Please Help! Display Problem!

My 8890V is about 11 months old now. Worked perfectly until today. The display began to blink slowly: Like at first, it would go black and then spring back to life again after about 20 seconds. The next time it happened, about a minute later, I noticed that the screen wasn't totally black; if I squinted, I could just barely make out the Windows on the screen, as if someone had turned the "brightness" way down. While it was dark like this, I could still click away, and the computer would run ok. Then it would spring back to normal. Over an hour or so, while I tried System Restore and GoBack software to see if this would help, the flickering increased in frequency and progressively lasted for shorter periods. Now, it goes from normal to dark to normal again about every five seconds. Moreover, now when it comes back to normal, it flickers real fast for about 5 seconds. I also tried rebooting and changing the refresh rate, with no effect. It is beginning to scare me. Anticipating a potential problem, I quickly tried to back up on CD-R my most important work files. Halfway into putting the files onto the E: drive for writing, I get a Windows Explorer error and it shuts down the copying process. Thought it might be a coaster problem, but got the same result from another blank CD-R. I am not very tech-savvy, but will take advice and try anything at this point. Sorry for the long dissertation, but I figured the more details given, the better chance at a diagnosis. Oh yeah, I haven't updated BIOS or drivers since getting the computer. Why ? 1)Never needed to. 2)Didn't want to mess with a perfectly-running machine and risk screwing it up royal. Thanks for caring and thanks for any thoughts you can offer.

Here's a new development: I ran it on battery power for an hour without the screen going dark... Then, with 3 min of battery power left, I got the usual "Hook up to AC power soon, battery critical..." message. At that time, the screen dimmed again and when I popped the AC adapter on, the screen brightened up. Do you think that I have a loose connection inside from battery (or AC inlet) to motherboard that makes the MB erroneously think I don't have any juice? A short circuit might make it flicker from hibernate to normal and back again. Any thoughts? Does the screen going nearly black sound like hibernation to you? As in "inappropriate hibernation", flickering back and forth to normal power? If yes, then, what do I do to correct this? I have the power save option to "Always On" or something like that. Thanks for your help!

Oh yeah, 8887. My bad. Heheh. Let me try some simple maneuvers and then I'll repost when I can. Thanks for all the input. BTW, how do you adjust brightness again? I can't seem to find either a slider wheel or a software app to do this.

Thanks. I tried reinserting the battery, with no resolution of the problem. I found a brightness slider in the ATI Video Card options under Dsiplay>Properties... Again, no effect. I do use it nearly exclusively with the battery in place, but on AC power.. Is this not good for the battery, then? They should say that somewhere...?

Well, in addition to the above, I tried reinstalling the latest ATI driver. Didn't work. I also took out the battery and ran it off AC power alone, thinking I may have a bad cell. Again, didn't work. I called Sager for help. I think it's beyond my capability to fix at home, unfortunately. Thanks for all the thoughts. -Rig