+1
What Flicker said.
My guess, If it's older, you may have a VGA monitor output port. If slightly newer, could be HDMI. For either one, you can probably find adapters and/or cables to connect from whatever port it is to your external monitor at Best Buy. Screens go bad eventually. Worse case and the laptop is dead and irreparable, you can backup your current drive to another but will probably need the help of a local techie friend.
If you ran an update on your graphics driver, that might be it but given the age probably not. See what you can pull up with the external monitor and go from there.