Comment 119 for bug 765438

Hi everybody
- Dell Latitude E4310 / core i5 with intel graphics chip
- LTS 12.04
This bug is VERY SEVERE on my laptop (actually, it is almost broken now and I will soon need a new one).
reason:
- when it happens there is no backlight and nothing to do, or almost
- it is quite random. I tried almost all of the above tricks (stepci, boot options --- but not yet i915 invert brighness nor the change in rc.local, this is for next time it happens) and it does not work, or sometimes it does but it is never very clear what works, since the bug always reappears later
- I tried (using an external display) : to echo 1 in intel_backlight/brightness, to manually (after login) increase the brightness, etc, etc. No effect.
- I tried also Kamal's kernels (it was almost worst: sometimes instead of going blank in power save mode it was turning white)
- Sometimes (not always) suspending / resuming works
- sometimes rebooting works. last time I rebooted using a different kernel and it worked, I will check whether this is reproducible (next time I get the bug... but I'd rather never have it again)
- sometimes unplugging the battery and waiting for some time works (not anymore, though, it seems)
- sometimes nothing works and my laptop is unusable for some time
- when the backlight is broken, it stays broken even when I boot Windows
- Dell came and changed my display 1 month ago. Now Windows is broken (thanks a lot Dell, I was not using it very often but now I have no choice :-), but the bug happened again after a few weeks (bizarre, uh?)

I'm afraid I will have to forget about using Linux if all recent kernels of all major distributions can break your computer.....
(But what? get a mac?? --- in fact I'll certainly get a different graphics system next time...)
sorry for being so pessimistic, this is the first time I encounter such a severe problem under linux...
Best, thanks to all developers