Alienware area 51m screen failure

Gauntlet Guy · March 10, 2023

Can anyone offer any help.

I have an Alienware Area-51m brought in 2019. In 2022 the lcd backlight stared to fail. A fairly odd issue if you turned up the brightness the whole thing would go dark. You could still see the screen but it was dark.
if you then set the brightness to 0 it would light up, but again if you turned up the setting… dark.

This got progressively worse it happened all the time and was only dark.

dell had he by a replacement LCD. The issue still happened after the fix but then it stopped and worked fine.

now 8 months on I’m getting the same issue back.

im currently arguing with dell about their 90 day warranty and uk consumer law stating a product need to be fit for purpose. So they can stick their 90 bull and replace the unfit for purpose item! But I digress.

Has anyone heard of this issue??

is it a faulty lcd or something another part?
Or something else entirely?

problemsolver · March 10, 2023

13 minutes ago, Gauntlet Guy said:

Has anyone heard of this issue??

is it a faulty lcd or something another part?
Or something else entirely?

I can't speak to that specific computer model, but what you're describing is typical backlight failure. LCDs have a backlight (LED or CCFL) that shines through the LCD screen. You can still see the screen with no backlight due to the LCD screen functioning (but I'm sure it's difficult to see with no backlight).

There's probably a component that is going bad over time that is involved in regulating the backlight. Capacitors, inverters, etc. could be the issue (or straight up LEDs going bad). The faulty component may be on the mainboard.

If it helps, when you talk to Dell, you can always say the backlight is out on your laptop and make sure you mention you can still see the screen and that the LCD/GPU is functioning. (it's just dark) to prove to them why you know it's the backlight that is the issue.