Screen Not Turning On

I purchased a refurbished Fuze 4GB about 6 months ago, and recently the screen is not turning on at all. The device itself turns on - it still plays music - but the screen remains black. This used to happen only occasionally, but lately, the screen has only been lighting up when I plug in my device to my compter, and it immediately goes black afterwards. What might be the cause of this, and is there a way to fix it?

Any help is appreciated.  

I don’t think there’s much hope.

Refurbs are always a gamble–SanDisk doesn’t fix them, so you are at the mercy of the seller, whoever that might be. SanDisk doesn’t guarantee them.

You could try reinstalling or updating the firmware.

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Fuze/Sansa-Fuze-Firmware-Update-01-02-31-amp-02-03-33/td-p/139175

But if it’s a hardware problem–as I suspect it is, like a broken backlight–it’s time to look for another player.

The Clip+ apparently uses the same processor as the Fuze, though it puts out less power. You can add a microSD card to the 2GB of this one:

http://shop.sandisk.com/store/sdiskus/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/CategoryID.13937600/productID.255815700

I, myself have a Fuzev2 with a cracked screen. I can only see portions of it. I moved on for a while with newer Fuze+.

However, for sentimental reasons I decided to “revive” the Fuze using Rockbox. Rockbox has a text-to-speech feature intended to make the player usable for the blind. If you have no screen, Rockbox might be a good solution for you.

However, I tend to find that Rockbox spells everything a little too fast for you to figure out what the computer-generated voice is spelling. Also, it mispronounces A’s as I’s. If you don’t want to fork out any money, though, Rockbox might still be a good solution.