hp laptop monitor not working

My roommates 4 year old HP laptop will start up with nothing on the monitor. You cant see boot up or anythiing. I hear the fan running and the lights on the keyboard are there. We plugged it in to the tv and it did not work. I confirmed this method does work as I plugged my laptop in and it popped up immediately on the tv. Anyways, I found a site that listed errors and what possible out comes are. What it came up with was this was a board failure. So we are assuming the motherboard is toast and he needs a new laptop. Just wanted to confirm if this sounds like a reasonable deduction. Thanks for any help

 

okay, he had this problem, for a couple days, now just as i finished this post, he was rapping on his laptop and restarted and the screen came up, but it seems to go back and forth, It now works and works on the tv. Is this a problem than can be prevented or fixed? Or is the laptop going down the crapper slowly? Again we are noobs on this. Thanks

 

, sorry for the quadruple post, have no idea how that happened