Vostro 1400 display dead... suggestions?

About 2 weeks ago, I turned on my laptop and nothing showed up in the display, not even the BIOS screen. I could hear the hard drive and fan and the lights turned on so I knew everything was working. I had to restart a few times before it started working again. I had to do this everytime I shut down.

Today, I restarted about 20 times and it still wouldn't turn on. I connected the laptop to an external monitor and everything worked normally.

I want to open up the display to check it. I'm not even sure how to open it up or what I can do once I open it.

What options do I have? Where can I buy the display screen part for it?

 

Most likely your backlight is dead. Can you make out anything faintly on your screen if you shine a light onto it? Replacing just a backlight is possible, but kind of a pain. It's probably easiest to replace the entire LCD in this case; a vanilla WXGA screen for the 1400 doesn't seem to be too expensive on eBay.

http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_trkpar...&_sticky=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_sop=15&_sc=1

Could also be some sort of loose connector. You can try to reseat the display connector as shown in the service manual, though I doubt this is the problem.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins1420/en/SM/display.htm#wp1107639