Hello, I have been doing repair jobs on laptops for people on the side for awhile now and I have just been contacted by a problem that is a bit confusing. He says when the he has replaced the inverter a few times now and after just replacing it recently it went out after only 2 days. The other problem is that when he plugs in the laptop with ac power the screen goes black. I would assume the motherboard needs to be replaced but I also though it might be some frayed wires in the inverter. Anyone ever had a simular problem?

I think the guy's being a bit overzealous in winding the cord around his power brick. Which what I assume you mean by "inverter". You can ruin the power supply by putting too much strain on the connection coming out of the brick.

I would say try another power supply and see if that fixes it. If you still get a black screen issue. Leave the laptop plugged in, shut down, and then hold down the Fn key while pressing the power button. This runs Dell's pre-boot system assessment which has an LCD inverter test. It could be a bad backlight inverter in the LCD.

Around here, we use the word inverter for a device that changes DC current into AC. The power cord for the laptop we call the power cord, AC Adapter, or brick.

He just sent me another message saying this
I could see the screen at first just barely. Then nothing.

Last night here is what I did:

Replaced Inverter, power adapter still caused screen to go black (immediately)

Changed brightness setting to level 4 instead of level 8 (default) , plugged in power adapter, and this Worked!!!! I was thinking what a success, that worked for approx 2 hours and then BAM, black screen again……………..

I did notice that during that 2 hour stint the fan’s never turned on at all. So I thought maybe the AC Adapter might have caused the machine to over heat, but I am an amateur and really have no idea.


Does that explain anything else?