Color correction and inverted color on laptop

[Underhanded]

Hey all~ My friend asked me to take a look at his Averatec 3200 series laptop computer.
He told me "the color was off" and . well .. oh my god.
Every single color on the screen is inverted, for example, the default windows xp bootscreen is white instead of black. The screen brightness is insanly painful to look at, and is quiet nausiating. I'm thinking the LCD screen might be broken, since I've tried everything I can think of with the options windows xp gives you. No color correction settings changes affect the way it looks. When I plugged an external crt monitor into the VGA port, the display works beautifully on the CRT.. but looks the same aweful inverted on the laptops lcd.
Thought Id run it by the experts before I tell my buddy to send it back if he can..
Do you guys also think the lcd screen is defective? Apparently, its always been like this.
EDIT:: I updated the graphics drivers to the most recent and installed the newest version of DirectX. No change.
Also updated windows, still no change.

[flanzig1]

He should check to see if there is any warranty left. But, as to the problem, could be the LCD but need to consider that the video chip/card could be bad.

[Underhanded]

Aye, I considered that. I dismissed those ideas though after plugging a CRT monitor into the VGA port on the laptop and having it work beautifully. I could not repeat the problem on any other monitor.. everything else seemed to work fine.

[flanzig1]

Well, on some newer laptops can run dual monitor not just a slave image, so may have different compnents running the two outputs.