Maya PLE works basically the same as Maya Complete, excluding the abilty to use plugins, export/import and renders have the PLE logo over them.

If your renders are just black screen, its more likely you are rendering without the default light being enabled or using the wrong renderer.

This is turned on and off by going to:

Window > Rendering Editors > Render settings...

At the bottom of this list is Render Options ensure:

Enable Default Light is ticked

and you are rendering in Maya Software and not hardware or Vector. Hope this helps solve you dylema.