Toshiba Screen Broken, Have External Monitor

Hello,
My Father recently got his laptop back from a friend and found out the screen was broken. You can't see anything on it but distorted pixels. The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite, I don't know much else about it. We have a compact external monitor that we've hooked up to the laptop, but when we turned it on we received nothing from the compact --the screen was just black. After looking online we discovered that typing in his password did something, and the external monitor displayed only the background and nothing else. There were no program shortcuts, no task bar --no nothing. We're wondering if anyone can help us so that the external monitor displays his things. (If we right click to try properties, nothing pops up. It continues to stay on the background picture he has set.) We're also not that computer savy, so detailed instructions would be most best. Thank you so much to anyone willing to lend us a hand!