Originally Posted by gleff
Of course the other option is connecting the laptop via a USB cable to a monitor, pulling all the files off, and buying a new laptop. But if it's doable to replace the screen on this 1 year old machine that would be ideal.
You mean a VGA cable, right? Connect the laptop to a spare monitor (or borrow one from a desktop system), If the new screen doesn't come up automatically on your monitor, press "function" plus the function key marked LCD/CRT (or marked like that pictographically) until the monitor comes up. On my Dell i600m it's the F8 key, so I would press and hold the "Function key" and press and release F8, wait a minute to see if it comes up, if not, repeat. Usually, it should just come up by itself as a duplicate copy of your main screen, which of course, you can't see since it's damaged, but the default mode is what you want. If it doesn't come up by itself, try the function key, giving it several seconds to initialize the adaptor to get in dual screen mode between attempts. The settings are usually laptop LCD only, external monitor only and both LCD and external monitor on. The key sequence should cycle through those three modes.
-David