This is a long shot but the bairn's laptop has packed up - you can switch it on but nothing loads and the screen stays blank. This just happened out of the blue, it had been working fine previously.

Is it for the knackers yard? Hope not because there's loads of her school work on there.

Any help would be much appreciated as she's far from happy in the way that only teenagers can be......

I'd take it to a repair place but I saw a programme where most of them nicked all your personal data as a matter of routine.

It may just be the screen - have you got another monitor you can plug in to check ?

Cheerrs, I'll give that a go. But it doesn't seem to make the whirring etc. sounds like it used to when it was loading up (I'm not very technical!), it just turns on the lights come on but no noise like there used to be.

Does it boot up in safe mode?

Hmmm that sounds less than good - if you manage to get a monitor on it at least it may put out a message which will give a clue to the problem - good luck!

Er, no I don't think so. Looking like it's knackered?

remove the harddrive if it not completely knackered you'll be able to recover the data (school stuff ) off it

Dependant on whether anything shows on the screen, Download a program called Knoppix http://www.knoppix.net/ burn that to disc. Put the disc in the machine and boot up using Knoppix to retrieve the data.

Best of luck