[pablissimo]

Acers can be bought reasonably cheaply and I've had mine for two years now with absolutely no problems. My girlfriend just bought a newy, £500 or so, with a staggeringly pretty rigid screen though she went for an AMD Turion proc in it which feels less than awesome in Vista (though she's got all the bells and whistles turned on so ymmv). You even get surprisingly good graphics chips in them (there's a decent enough ATI Mobility chip in this to run C&C3 quite happily), large HDDs and good amounts of RAM for very little money really.

Notebooks are frankly absurdly cheap compared even with a year ago, especially considering the spec you can get for your money. For twice what you'd likely pay for a consultation and repair on your existing one you can get a new one that'll probably be spec'd about twice as good as the broken one was anyway.

And if you're thinking of going down that route, you might as well see if you can get some of the case removed near the screen hinges and check it's nothing obvious like a loose/broken cable. Even if you can't fix it, you can probably sell it for parts to pay for a few bevvies so it's pretty much win-win.

Just don't buy it from EBuyer, which would pretty much be my standard advice for any purchase that you can't afford to make again if it arrives broken and you're left waiting two months for a damned RMA.