Folks, I know I said I would blog more in the new year and I will but in the mean time I just wanted to share an interesting point about my laptop screen.

I have an ACER Travelmate 6592, the power supply blew for it last week and after buying what I thought was a genuine replacement only to find it was a dud, I now have the genuine part (from a different supplier).  I have now started having issues with the back-light of the LCD display, it would hiss and flicker before dieing completely.  I should say this problem occurred on both Windows vista & 7 and on Ubuntu Linux regardless of kernel version.

Thinking the un-clean power from the dodgie replacement power adapter may have damaged the back light bulb I was all for buying a new one and embarking on the daunting task of changing the back-light, until that is I discovered this blog post by Aral Balkan

Running the laptop on mains with the battery in causes screen flicker / black screen, where as running it with just mains or just battery it works fine.

I should also say that if you are running a laptop on mains all of the time you will shorten the life of your battery, therefore removing the battery from all laptops whilst running on mains for a long period of time is not necessarily a bad thing.

The only question is do I want to pay acer to repair my now out of warranty acer travelmate 6592?

Hope this helps some others out there and a massive thanks to Aral Balkan for his blog post.