I purchased a MS8266 2 years ago and most of that time it has been sitting in a drawer unused. I've only ever used the basic functions like DC volts <=12v and ohm measurements, and continuity. So very light weight use and no chance of doing anything stupid and blowing it up. A few days ago I was measuring some 3.3v dc stuff on a breadboarded prototype project and noticed the display flickering and very slow autoranging, almost like each flicker was a reset and it had to start over. Eventually it stopped working altogether, I get no display at all and no sound (ex put it in continuity mode and touched the leads together with no tone output), no warning lights on the inputs if plugged into the wrong place, etc. From what I can tell it is 100% dead (almost like no batteries are even installed) EXCEPT for the back-light which still works exactly as before if I press the back light button. The back-light is the only sign of life I've gotten from the meter. I've opened it up, replaced batteries and checked the fuse, etc. I'm for sure a newbie so I was mostly looking for obvious signs like loose components. I haven't looked in detail at all the SMD components to see if any of those are loose but I'll probably do that next. Are there any general pointers to help me troubleshoot this meter or should I just give up because it's not worth it for a cheap meter like this? I do plan to buy a nicer meter soon because I've really started to take renewed interest in tinkering with electronics projects (haven't done much of anything in 10 years now). I almost pulled the trigger earlier today on the EEVblog BM235 on Amazon, but decided not to be impulsive and research first. Once I decided to buy it and went back a few hours later its now saying unavailable

I've only been watching EEVblog for a few weeks now and hadn't ventured back to many previous episodes yet to know much about the meter or that it was a fairly hot commodity until it was too late... oh well. Regardless of when I do I get a nicer meter, I'd still like to fix this one if reasonably possible to have as a backup and to use in the garage, etc.
Thanks