I have an acer aspire one netbook. The screen is black but the computer turns on (LED's are on, fan is spinning, etc.)

By black I mean absolutely no backlight. I tried to remove the battery and power it on to "discharge" it (I read that on the Internet, not sure if that ever fixes anything), but no luck. I also tried to replace the RAM stick with another one (which I know for sure is working properly), still no luck. I tried to connect an external monitor and switch to it (fn + f5 on this particular model), still no luck, nothing on the external monitor. I read that flashing the BIOS could fix it (http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/22042-acer-aspire-one-black-screen-of-death), I tried to flash it but basically it doesn't do anything when I power it on with the usb thumb drive. No blinking power button.

To me it sounds like it might be a dead motherboard, a dead RAM slot (there's only one), or the BIOS thing. I would like to rule out the BIOS possibility, but I need help. The reason I ruled out the dead screen possibility is that it did not switch to the external display when I pressed fn + f5, am I wrong by assuming so?

Thank you for your help.