Deafault monitor turned off in control panel on laptop..help..

hi,i need help please...the default monitoor on my laptop has been turned off in the control panel,so i basically cant see anything.the secondary monitor isnt enabled..how do iget into my control panel to turn the monitor back on?
the laptop is a dell latitude d610,running on xp...thankyou

Hello and welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums.

By the way, there's a specialist XP sub-Forum you might like to browse through - someone may have had this problem before and found an answer here.

To switch between the internal (laptop) screen and an external screen on a 610 is 'fn+f8', if you boot up and you see the usual power lights, hdd etc then try this once things have stopped flashing. Depending on the age of the machine then it could be a HW issue as there were problems with the inverter and back light on some models from what I read.

Suggested solution:

If possible hook the laptop up to an external monitor, boot the machine and try the fn+F8 combination to see if you can get a display on the external screen. If you can try fn+F8 again and see if the laptop screen shows life.

If you don't get any display using the external monitor then it might be a Windows issue. Easy way to check would be to boot from an install disc to see if you get the first screen or something like a Linux LiveCD.

If you still see no screen then it's likely HW. It might be worth having a look at:

http://www.laptop-junction.com/toa [...] goes-black

before you take it to the shop and ask them to check the inverter and light first before they do anything else to it.