Display problem on my laptop

I have an HP Pavilion dv7-1175 laptop. It comes with a C2D processor, BD drive, 17" screen, 4GB RAM, nVidia Geforce 9600M GT with 512MB DDR2 graphics card, VGA and HDMI ports, and an expansion port 3 (for docking station or something). I hadn't made a restore CD yet as I've only had it a month so far.

This past week, the screen stopped working. When I boot up the computer, the screen backlight comes on and I can see the images come up, but they are severly distorted and unrecognizable. I tried hooking up another monitor to the VGA port and got a screen once, but then I tried to uninstall the video driver so that I could re-install it and now it won't display on the other monitor, stupid move of mine I know...

I'm fairly certain that this problem is a software problem but I'm not sure how to fix it. Any suggestions are welcome. I think I managed to boot into safe mode, but it didn't do anything to help the problem...