My Philips X58 Freevents laptop's screen has stopped lighting up, however I can just see that there are my programmes on the screen if I shine a torch onto it. Can you advise the fault and how best fixed. Thanks.

A faint and barely visible image on the screen indicates that the backlight(s) that illuminates the display isn't powering on. A device called an inverter board takes DC power from the laptop motherboard and converts it to AC power to power the screen backlight.
Before attempting anything below, be sure and remove the laptop battery and unplug the laptop
You need to take the screen apart and check to make sure that no cables are loose that are connected to the inverter board. If everything is secure, the next thing I would do is try to test the inverter board by hooking up an LCD from another laptop to the inverter and turning the laptop on to see if it lights up. If the other screen does light up, then the inverter board is likely good and your backlight needs to be replaced. Backlight replacement, unfortunately, can be very tricky for even an experienced technician, and many will opt to just replace the entire screen.
If you can't test the inverter board, then it might be worth it to order one and see if installing it fixes the problem.
Youtube is a great place to check for instructional videos on laptop repair, such as this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXLR5yY7X4
Finally, if you can't or don't want to repair the display problem, then you can always hook an external monitor or a television up to the video port and use your laptop that way.

Good luck!