help with craptop computer?

so a few months ago (I'm pretty apathetic), my laptop screen decided to flicker in and out of consciousness, forcing a reboot to get it to work. About a week later, it died completely. I'm been running off of an external monitor since then, but I'd kind of like to get my screen back running since, all of a sudden, I'm going to be travelling more often and would enjoy having a laptop to do work on/publically masturbate with.

I've got an hp pavillion dv9700 (which a little cursory research has shown me that I'm not the only one with these problems... there's a whole crew of people who bought this computer then, a few months after the warranty expired had both the internal and external displays crap out on them), and it's running the NVidia GeForce 7150M/nForce 630M. The issues with the hp 9000 series was the NVidia 8600 card, which casually overheated on a regular basis before murdering the computer with heat. I doubt that this is the case with me (mine wasn't listed on the nvidia defective list, afaik).

I've tried reformatting C: and reinstalling the drivers for it. At first, it wasn't even recognizing the internal monitor until i played around with it some more. Now it does recognize a second monitor, and I've set it up for a dual display, but there's no image whatsoever on my laptop screen. Is the screen just completely fried? Is there anything else I can really do for it?

thanks for the help in advance.