Broken (black) Macbook Pro screen, Want to use external monitor.

Long story short I have a Macbook Pro older version like 2007-08. The screen is broken and I cannot seem to get it to hook up to an external monitor. I've tried booting it up and holding cmd + F1, Nothing. I've tried booting it up and shutting the screen and using an external mouse to try and wake up the external monitor, nothing.
Heres 3 things that I can imagine are going wrong.
1) My external mouse is garbage and doesn't work.
2) I need an external mouse and keyboard.
3) I use to run Windows 7 on the computer as well. So whenever I booted my computer on i would have to hold the option key or it would go directly to windows. When I held the option key it would show 2 hard drives the mac and the windows, then I would have to click the Mac hard drive in order for it to bring me to the Mac login screen.
I'm thinking I might have to be at the mac login screen in order to do anything?
But I'm not sure.
I've been trying to guesss my way around with the track pad to try and click the mac harddrive logo (After holding option) but I can't seem to get it.
Is there ANY other way to get this to work. I replaced my mac lcd about a year ago and not it is black again for some reason. I took it apart today and tried unplugging anf plugging everything in again but it still doesn't work. So I really want this external monitor to work.
Guess that wasn't to short of a story!!
Thanks,
Anthony

If an external display doesn't work, its possible your video card is shot or the connector is bad. The Mac Pro's video card is pretty easy to replace. If you have the Apple display I think there are some diagnostic lights that flash when something is wrong with the display itself.
You are talking about a "headless" Mac (no screen) so a search on that would turn up several options. What you need to do is use another Mac to boot up in Firewire Target Mode as a one-time operation. While in there, set your OS for remote screensharing access in the Sharing prefpanel. You can also enable "Remote Login" if you do command line and that is very useful for headless controlling.

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