My laptop has a blank screen?

My laptop is an Advent 7037. It powers up and fan runs but nothing appear on the screen at all (not even a cursor). Neither does it output to a seperate monitor. Before the display stopped working it developed a fault where flickering lines appeared across the bottom of the screen but it still worked for a long time with this fault. Could it be that the video card has broken down (nVidia GeForce FX Go 5300) and if so can it be replaced or are there compitible alternatives?