[mtlmouth]

I didn't break my computer again, I promise. This time it's Mom's. HP laptop running XP.

For whatever reason today, it decided not to continue sending a video signal to the monitor, apparently. The computer seems to boot just fine, but there's no picture at all. I'm pretty confident that it's not a backlight issue (been there, done that). I've tried hooking it up to an external monitor and to the television, but I can't get it to switch monitors without being able to see what I'm doing (even with the keyboard shortcuts).
Based on my Google research, it sounds like the monitor not working is a pretty generic symptom, so I'm not really sure where to begin troubleshooting beyond that.
Any tips on switching monitors for troubleshooting? Any ideas on what could be the problem?

[Cam42]

If it's not sending video to another screen, it's probably the video card.

[Sean.thomson]

This happened to me once, but I was just silly and accidentally turned off the monitor with the fn+F# thingy.....

[mtlmouth]

And now my dad's laptop is having almost exactly the same problems, though I can get an external monitor to work on it while Windows boots, but then the monitor says there's no input as soon as Windows starts. This laptop is a Toshiba on Windows Vista with a prior history of display problems (replaced the backlight last year, and it frequently decides that everything on the screen should be pink).
I know the symptoms aren't quite the same, and this seems unlikely to be a virus, but the timing does seem way too weird. Has anyone heard of viruses that would do this sort of thing?

[Giga Hertz]

Originally Posted by mtlmouth

And now my dad's laptop is having almost exactly the same problems, though I can get an external monitor to work on it while Windows boots, but then the monitor says there's no input as soon as Windows starts. This laptop is a Toshiba on Windows Vista with a prior history of display problems (replaced the backlight last year, and it frequently decides that everything on the screen should be pink).
I know the symptoms aren't quite the same, and this seems unlikely to be a virus, but the timing does seem way too weird. Has anyone heard of viruses that would do this sort of thing?

Extremely unlikely if you aren't even getting visuals for the BIOS.

[mtlmouth]

Originally Posted by Giga Hertz

Extremely unlikely if you aren't even getting visuals for the BIOS.

Yeah, that's what I figured.
Upon further testing, these problems aren't really that similar. I've been able to get Dad's laptop booted in safe mode while hooked up to the television, but it won't start in normal Windows mode with or without the external display, and I believe it wasn't working in safe mode without the external display.
Regardless, I was able to back up the documents on it, so that one's not longer at crisis status, but I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong. I tried a system restore, since something seems to be wrong with Windows, but that didn't help at all.
Now back to puzzling over Mom's...

[BillSPrestonEsq]

Originally Posted by Cam42

If it's not sending video to another screen, it's probably the video card.

On a laptop, another usual suspect is the ribbon cable that carries visual data through the hinge. Those have a pretty horendous history of breaking, sometimes rather suddenly and causing rather obscure problems as they can cause shorts with the cable damage. Also... LCDs generally don't last much longer than 5 years on older laptops, so the lcd could just have given out entirely. The fact that it won't go to an external screen is worrisome. How are you telling windows is booting?

The dad computer sounds like the pink thing would make this very likely to be a cable issue. My guess is the blue cable was frayed as that can cause everything to look pink. Usually, when one goes, they are all close.