No display only black screen

Trying to help a friend out with their early 2008 Macbook Pro. It was working fine, he shut it off a couple of days ago, when he tried to turn it on the other day it made all the appropriate sounds, start up "bong", optical drive noise and the slight hard drive noise you hear. The keyboard backlight works fine as well. The screen is just black. I've tried holding a flashlight on it and still can't see anything. I've tried hooking an external monitor up to it and can't seem to be able to get anything to output either. The volume up/down keys seem to work too. Any thoughts?

EDIT: I've seen on here the "led driver board" I'm thinking that could be the fix but, I'm unsure. I can't imagine the display itself went bad, don't they "typically' have a long life?!?!