David Michaels, use an external display and see if it does display. If it does you most likely have an issue with you LCD. If it does not, it could be cause by a bad HDD , a bad motherboard or a bad BIOS. Remove the memory, the battery and the power supply. Hold the power button down for 30 seconds. then reinstall the minimum amount of memory and the power supply. Try a restart. If not then remove the memory and powering up the notebook to see if you get any error beeps. Let us know if you get anything. See if you can access your BIOS by pressing either the F1, F2, the ESC or F10 key while the Gateway is in the startup process. If you can see your boot option, set it to optical drive and insert a bootable disk. See if that brings the display back.