V6133EU no external monitor out!

Compaq Presario V6000. exact model number V6133EU. XP media centre installed

it has a faulty wifi card so i picked the thing up for free off someone who didnt want it (the wifi card isnt recognised and doesnt work). apparently its from the range of laptops where the motherboard warps slightly under heat. i know a load of these HP compaq ones have faulty VGA chips (some that are ball grid arrays where the solder cracks).

Basically i cant get the external monitor out working. Running windows XP
- when i plug in a 2nd display it shows on the properties and recognises the monitor but nothing goes out to the display.

i've tried 3 monitors. 2 do nothing, one of them, if i connect the monitor from startup, during booting it has the XP logo and all the BIOS info on the display but then when it gets onto the OS it goes crazy. like only the colour blue is being displayed. tried booting from an ubuntu live CD and, again, the 2nd screen looks fine until the proper window manager starts up. then it just becomes one blue screen.

Geforce Go 6150 VGA. the only drivers are Compaq's own ones. So i uninstalled the current ones and installed the latest from the compaq website, however they are 4 years old.

Just wondering if theres anything else I can do with it. whether it is another known fault with this laptop or anything.

thanks for the help, i'm doing programming on it and the extra monitor would be really useful!
dont want to buy another laptop really just for this.

thanks,
dan gent