Help! Aspire 5735 laptop with broken screen won't recognize external monitor after factory restore

I have an ACER Aspire 5735 running horrible Vista that never worked right from the beginning, always locked up, media player never worked right, on and on, and after about a year my dog got caught in the power cord and flung it off the table and the screen smashed. I used it with an external monitor for awhile, but it was even worse after that and after taking it in to get fixed it still proceeded to run super slow, always locked up, refused to shutdown or start up normally, and so it has been sitting in a closet for about 3 years.

I got it out about a week ago to see if I could at least use it for my boyfriends kids to play on, but it was still having so many issues I decided to do a factory restore. And of course the recovery disks I made back when I first got it do not work and are not even recognized by the computer. So I went online and used a method I found there by restarting and hitting the ALT F10 buttons until I was at the factory reset option. This worked GREAT!!!! Except once the computer had restarted and opened up to windows the monitor went blank and I can't do anything with the computer because apparently it does not recognize that it is hooked to an external monitor on the factory restore settings!!!! Help!

It did recognize the monitor as it was restarting, and even had the windows start icon displaying, but as soon as it loads the screen goes black with just the "monitor is on but not hooked up to anything" graphics floating around.

Is there any way to get access to something in DOS or otherwise to get it to recognize the external monitor?  Or is it finally toast?