NEO M72S Laptop Black Screen

This serves as a journal of sorts of the steps I tried in order to resolve the "black screen" issue on a NEO M72S Laptop. But aside from that, I hope it is able to help you out in troubleshooting your own laptop problems.

Symptoms:
When turning on the laptop, you know there is power since there is a light on the power button and you hear the laptop fan spinning, but all you get is a black screen. I also kept hearing the DVD drive create some kind of noise, as if it was trying to read a DVD, but there was no media present in the drive.

Troubleshooting steps taken:

• Thought it was a DVD drive issue. Tried removing the DVD drive from the laptop. Refer to YouTube for some tutorials. (Did not resolve the issue)
• Pressed CTRL - ALT - DEL (A.K.A. the three fingered salute) simultaneously repeatedly. BIOS screen was able to come up after several tries.
• Checked BIOS settings. Made sure the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) was the first boot device. Saved settings.
• Checked power saving options in Windows XP. Made sure no settings made the laptop go to sleep or turn off after several minutes of being idle.
• Updated AVG definitions in Windows XP and ran a full system scan. AVG didn't find anything.
• Swapped out RAM with known good RAM from another laptop. This seems to be the issue since the other laptop which was originally working fine is now encountering the "black screen" issue.

So at this point, after almost an entire day of troubleshooting, the only way I can get the original laptop to work is by pressing CTRL - ALT - DEL until I can get the start up screen. Even if I shutdown or restart from Windows, the laptop ends up in the "black screen" state and I have to either power down manually (holding down the power button for 5 seconds, or press CTRL - ALT - DEL to get back into BIOS/Windows).