Toshiba Tecra A8 -S8514 - LCD Problem

I bought Toshiba Tecra A8 -S8514 after lots of research in April 07 (only 16 months back) and I thought I am buying a good , desktop replacement notebook. Though I worked happily all these days (16 months), to my surprise, its LCD has gone bad now. There is no backlight, though I can see the window very faintly if I put it in bright light and see it closely but its almost dark and not usable. Some times it starts working properly but it goes dark again in few minutes. Surprisingly at moments, I saw it working and click of mouse made it to become dark again. (was it due to a software problem???) . At two-three occaisions, I saw it flickering from the bottom right corner, at one occaision it was giving flickering sound also.
Two weeks back, to get this problem fixed, I took it to Toshiba authorised service center CPF Inc at Orlando. They could not clearly diagonise the problem and wanted to go for trial and error route at my cost. They suggested to replace the FL inverter at 140$ and they told me if it does not fix the problem, we have to go for LCD replacement. I hoped for the best and asked them to go ahead with FL inverter replacement. But, unfortunately it did not fix the problem. Then they suggested to replace the LCD for 340$ without giving credit of 140$ which I paid for inverter which did not fix the problem. I declined it and brought back my laptop.
Another technician offered me that he can fix the problem by replacing the vga cable and he did it for 75$. After his fix, though the LCD comes properly when I start the laptop from the off condition but withing few minutes (mostly during the booting process itself) it goes black. Some times it becomes black when I try to click the mouse to enter the password.
Now, before going for LCD replacement, wanted comments from other users if they faced such problem and how it was fixed.
Few years back, I had similar problem with Sony Vaio laptop and a technician resolved the problem by replacing the two flourscent tubes inside the LCD.
Please advise.
neal pressley