My apologies for the doublepost, but I didn't want to throw this on as an edit. heres some pictures of what I got so far. This is after I had taken the outer shell of the screen off, the bracket just below the screen off, and the keyboard out.
Image one shows the back PCB that quite frankly I'm not sure what it is. This is directly below the LCD
This is where the screen plugs into the board. note, the biggest plug actually says "LCD" on it, indicating it's the plug for the LCD. The plug to the left has some numbers and letters, maybe Cerces can decipher it. The plug to the right is for the built in webcam
This last picture is showing that the screen does in fact work. This is the dell splash.
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And now, a brief update. While taking it apart, I started it up to see if I could wiggle some cables, unplugged the plug from the thing just below the screen, moved things around. I got nothing. so I decided to hit the power button to turn it off, and for the briefeest of seconds I got to see my desktop for the first time ever! backlight fired back on, nice and bright and all. This leads me to further believe that the backlight is merely shorting out or not connected correctly, but I really have no idea which plug is the backlight! nor what to jiggle and test and all that. Thanks so far, hope this can be resolved. If not, I'll be taking the hard drive out and putting it into my other toshiba that has a cracked screen, but I have an HDMI cable for it to connect it to my tv