Well one would hope that the monitor would at least come on even for a few seconds if it was the CPU overheating. You could always open it up and see if the CPU heatsink is clogged with dust or whatever.
A colleague of mine is looking to purchase a laptop for video/image editing purposes. What should he look for?
Screen Size?
Graphics?
CPU?
Memory?
Hard Drive?
Any help would be appreciated.
Perhaps something in your laptop is causing it to draw too much power during start up for the battery to cope and that's why it's only working when you've got the AC adaptor connected.
If I'm not mistaken, with desktop PC's,you can run any resolution screen as long as the graphics card supports it.If your graphics card/chip supports the resolution you have in mind,it should work.I could be wrong though.