Desire Avenue

Does the backlight is on during the boot sequence of the computer (the 10 first seconds) ?
If yes, it's a very good news (turn the pc on in a dark room to test).

If not, more infos about the backlight :

http://www.fonerbooks.com/laptop_8.htm how to replace a vaio backlight

a very interesting topic about the vaio backlight
It may be a fuse to replace

Thanks for the info Alex, the backlight doesn't come on at all during the boot-up, but hopefully it might not be as difficult to fix as we initially thought. I've asked a couple of guys I know whether they'd look at it for me, but they both said I'd be better off taking it to a professional repairer. I'll do that as soon as I can afford to, but in the meantime I'm stuck with the permanent sunglasses effect.

I dug out an old PC monitor hoping I could just connect it up, but it must be ancient in computer terms because the ports are totally different to the ones on the laptop. Never mind.

Good to see you back Beth (even though you may not be able to see us too well )
Hope you get success soon!

vga is on top, so it must be this one on the monitor.
the bottom one is dvi on your laptop.

the vga dvi adapter is cheap and easy to find if you wish to plug the monitor on the pc.