MSI 10342 - The mystery of the black screen

I recently offered to help a friend fix an MSI MS-10342 notebook.

What's happening, is it'll start to boot, go through the usual startup, press F2 to enter setup, yadda yadda, and after that it will hang at a black screen and do nothing. Well kinda black. It's a little lighter than usual, kinda like it's a bit brighter or a tad more grey.

I can't for the life of me figure out what the problem is. I've tried hooking it up to an external monitor to see if it's a bad monitor or inverter but it isn't, it does the same thing on another functioning screen.

I have a gut feeling it might be a ram problem. I used to get black screen like this when I installed incorrect ram or when the ram was dead. Though I tried other types and it didn't like the other 512 stick I put in, though it was DDR I think and not DDR2. I did try whatever Ram was in my Asus EEE but I can't remember what it was. I also read about the thermal compound breaking down fast in MSI notebooks.

Keep in mind I don't have alot of history about the thing, just some comments from her about what happened-worked for a few months, wouldn't boot up, another tech said they needed more memory which I assume he meant ram, and apparently after the install it worked 3 weeks and failed like this again.

edit: i should also mention it says "checking nvram" before it craps out. sometimes at different speeds depending on which ram i put in which slot and sometimes it says "...ok" i think but still, always the same result.

 

....anyone?