Alright, this'll likely be a long post, so I apologize now.

I have a Dell Inspirion E1505 laptop that I received new in December, 2006.  I've used the computer mostly for school, only in the last year using it for gaming - World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Alien Swarm mainly.  For at least a year now, my computer needed to be plugged into the power cord for it to even work.  About a month and a half ago my power cord finally went out, so I bought a new power cord via Dell's website, it arrived in a few days, worked perfectly and I haven't had a problem with the power cord since.

Meanwhile, my battery was still crap and would get really hot if I had my computer on for more than an hour.  About a week ago, my sister was going to use my computer.  When she hit the power button, nothing happened.  Normally when I start up my laptop, a series of lights come on.  Three of these lights are the power light, the battery light, and the battery charging light.  When the computer actually turns on, the first two will light up.  However, when my sister tried to turn my laptop on, only the power light came on.  It appeared to me that the battery was so out of juice that no power was reaching it at all.  I figured a new battery would FIX the problem.

So I again went to Dell's website and I ordered a new battery for my laptop.  It arrived on Tuesday and I charged it up to full power.  I turned on my computer and everything worked; I figured my problem had been fixed.  However, ten minutes after this, my SCREEN suddenly goes black and I am unable to do anything.  I cannot see even my mouse.  I force a power down on my laptop, wait a couple minutes, then turn it back on.  The same problem my sister had encountered also happened to me; the power light comes on, but the screen remains entirely black and the battery-in-use light remains unlit.

From here, I'm not sure what to do.  I don't know if maybe I fried the power source in my computer.  I'm thinking that this may be an issue that requires me to send my computer off to get fixed.  Even if it is, I would like some idea as to what may be the issue so I know how much it'll cost to fix.  Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!A 2006 model laptop isnt worth putting much money into, especially if it was a cheap model then. New laptops can be bought for between $400 and $600 these days which would play those GAME titles with no problem as long as the GPU is decent. I got a toshiba satellite laptop for $429 running windows 7, 4gb ram, 500gb hd, and ATI GPU for gaming. Plays WoW and Guild Wars with no problems.

Most computer shops start at $100 just to diagnose, then labor + parts after that. Some places even if they cant fix it will charge you a fee to diagnose it and then hand you back a dead computer and a bill for $100 as a local HP/IBM/Toshiba certified repair center does.

So my suggestion is to see what other computers are out there if you can afford to buy one. If you cant afford a new computer then, you could take a chance to try to get it working again with a local repair shop or dell repair by mail service, but a 2006 model will probably be suggested to you to just replace it with a new computer as for parts may be obsolete for it.Did you ever find out what was happening to your computer?  I am having the same thing happen-  and of course, just went out of warranty.He made 1 post, 8 months ago; he's not going to answer.  Start your own thread & provide all details.