laptop not connecting to external monitor

[ryan12891]

I have a Vista laptop, and last november i dropped something on the screen, and it cracked. Now its all blurry, white lines everywhere and impossible to view anything. Anyway, after a few hours of wondering what the **** to do with a laptop that techically works, but with no screen, I realised I could connect it to an external monitor. I got an old one, connected it, and it worked fine. And it worked like this until February this year. Until one day, I plugged to cable from the monitor into my laptop, and nothing. Nothing came on the monitor.

So I gave up, and used an old XP laptop since. But recently this XP laptop is on its way out, and I've got my old laptop out with the broken screen. Heres some new observations I made when connecting it to my monitor:

The orange light on the monitor is on. My laptop screen is on. When I plug the VGA cable in to the VGA socket on my laptop, the monitor "acknowledges" that its there, the monitor makes a noise like when you turn a tv on. But still the orange standby light.

I've always used to fn+f4 key (that has a picture of a monitor on it) and when I press it now, the laptop screen (what I can see of it) goes black, and the monitor makes the noise again, it connects, but then nothing.

I've tried 3 monitors, all the same result!

Any ideas, something to do with the video card?

 

[Lexluethar]

Sound like the video card died on that laptop. Which means you would probably have to replace the MB since most laptops have an integrated video card in the motherboard. Something that is not cheap to replace.