Laptop help?

[Steele_obsidion]

its a long shot but before i take it into the mac store i figured I'd ask here.

I have a mac book pro its about 3 years old now and the screen went out, well at least i think so.

I was using it one night, working fine and all then the next morning the wife tells me it wont turn on. I mess with it and it does turn on, there IS sound and it seems like it is in fact working, however there is no screen picture. So I had an idea, what if I plug it into my desktop monitor, then it should pop up and I know my screen is just dead but i can at least use it on a monitor but cry because the apple store will charge me a million bucks for a new screen, but when I did that nothing happened, I'm thinking that the video card went, any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Jondot]

Hold on, so is there no picture from either the screen OR an external monitor? If so, exactly the same thing happened to mine about a year ago. There's actually a known fault with some of the MBP graphics cards, so if you've got an NVIDIA 8600M GT in there Apple will replace it for free. However, it could also be the logic board. And if that's gone you're looking at a huge bill - probably in the area of £500.

If you're still managing to get a picture on an external monitor, though, it's just the screen that's gone. And I'm guessing that'll be in the region of £150 or something. As I recall, the genius bar lot plugged something into a USB port on mine and from that gathered that the graphics card wasn't the issue. So the good news is that you'll know there and then whether it'll be a free repair or a costly one.