No screen

Very strange situation. Friend has an older gateway laptop with xp pro. She called me one day saying that there was nothing on the screen, just black. I took the laptop to see if I could fix it, and it worked perfectly. Did a little clean up work on it (virus scan, spyware scan, scan disk and defrag) and gave it back to her. She later called me back to say that there was nothing but a black screen! She sent it back to me. This time when I turned the laptop on, I got the black screen. The computer has power. I can hear it running, just nothing happens. Have tried several times since it worked for me before and just not for her, but this time I get nothing also. Did the hard drive fail? Could it be the video card and something is happening and I just can't see it? Any help will really be appreciated

 

Does it have any ports for a monitor on the back? many laptops do, so that bussiness users can hook them up to A/V sytems for presentations (Projectors in a board room for instance). If it does, hook up a working desktop monitor. If it still has a black screen, then it is most likely the actual display hardware, eg video card or onboard video.

 

Thanks for the reply. Will check it out with another monitor and see, but you are probably right about the video card. Would that also keep it from accessing the hard drive? Because I noticed that the light that indicates the hard drive is in use also doesn't come on anymore. At any rate, other than programing and replacing a hard drive, I have not done any work on a laptop. Is replacing a video card something a regular person can do or does it need to go to the shop? I have replaced parts on a desktop.