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I am having problems with my screen and ****. I just got a new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1501. It has 2 gbs of ram and came with vista. However, after i put it to sleep and come back to using it, eventually and almost without fail the screen will start to flash. The computer itself is still working, but the screen is not. Any solutions?

Hello k-log, welcome to PCHF.

Can you describe this flashing in more detail. Does this happen as soon as you switch your PC on or after a certain amount of time? How long does it last for? Can you see the content of the screen or does it flash a particular colour? And finally, does the flashing have a pattern or is it intermittent?

Had issues with mine coming out of "sleep", I take it you mean "stand by". Does it occure when you turn off the laptop completely? and reboot?

Haha you guys sure are thorough. I will give a recent example. I just put my computer into "sleep" then went away. I came back after an hour and opened it up, and it was flashing like it does. It was a green flash with no real patter, but typically it is a 1.5
second flash, followed by about .5 seconds of my screen's content (what i was doing). This doesn't happen if I restart my computer, only after sleep. Also, as a side not, this I recently re-installed vista because this same thing would happen, but the screen would not flash, just turn black. Now that i reloaded it is the green flash. Thanks again you guys.

Could you attache another monitor to you laptop to see if the fault still occirs? also check the event viewer for any application errors. Goto/start/control panel/administrative tools/event viewer/applications. double left click the applications on the right hand side. If there is an error, right click and choose properties. This may give a clue as to the cause.

In case i did not mention, i am pretty computer retarded. However, on the event log the thing it says during every screen flash session is "IRQARB: ACPI BIOS does not contain an IRQ for the device in PCI slot 5, function 0. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance.". nooooo idea what that means.

Try this. Goto/start/control panel/admin tools/computer management/left click device manager. in the list on the right hand side, find the "monitors" click on the box with a plus sign in it and another box under monitors will open, highlight this then right click. you should then have the option to scan for hardware changes. Choose this and see what hjappens. also try choosing the update driver option. it does sound like a hardware fault though is the laptop under garantee?