Literal hours after the start of the new year my laptop's screen began displaying flickering black lines. At first they were occasional and minor but they soon advanced to constant and taking up half the screen. I ran through the usual tech fixes: restarting, futzing with the drivers, asking Youtube. Nothing worked and I shut the silly thing down for the night. The next day I boot it up and its starts out better then devolves back to flickering then eventually going dim. The dimness was at least not constant flickering so I was happy. This happiness was not to last as the now dimmed screen began to develop burn in from images left on screen for more than a minute. This combined with the dimness to make most dark stuff illegible. By this point I'd already ordered a new laptop but I still needed to do somethings to prep for the transition and let me tell you it was miserable. Today I booted it up and it's the same story ... then it slowly got better ... and better... and now it's fine. I'm seeing one black line flicker per minute or less.
I'm not sorry that I bought the new laptop. My current one has a swollen battery, peeling bevels, and air bubbles under the screen. It was a refurbish and I'm happy that it lasted this long but it was time to replace it around six months ago and this just pushed me over the edge. I have minor concerns over the new one since manufacturing seems to have gotten shoddy since the pandemic but hopefully that won't be an issue. I trust Dell.
Yeah.