thanks SD! No it is a 4-year old Toshiba but I presume that it could be the inverter card anyway. I got the monitor to work fine and the laptop screen only has a thin black line at the bottom. Unless it gets way worse I will not bother to fix it. Thanks again!
Well this morning after an IOBIT defrag at boot time everything was fine. I found an inverter card on eBay for .98 with free S&H. Temporary reprieve for a finicky laptop ...