Stuck on a white screen

I tried that, somehow inserting a bootable USB key sped up the whole 57 second chime. Now the issue is the white screen still. It looks like it's just the backlight and the display doesn't function. As connecting it to an external display and hitting the mirror keys made me see the recovery menu. As for the ram, the current sticks are the default 1067 2GB kit that came with it.

The internal white screen and you have a working external display is telling me your internal display got damaged or is the wrong one for the system. Did someone replace it?

@danj The 2.26 will only take 8 GB of RAM

@mayer - I jumped too soon ;-{ Your right!

The screen was working right before the sales idiot furiously swapped ram. Here's my theory on what happened. Repeatedly switching the ram and turning it off using the battery ribbon cable along with running an incorrect ram set ended up corrupting something somewhere in the boot. Now with no output the guy panics and pulls at the display cable hoping for some display not knowing how to take it off and ends up damaging it. After that the rest is history. I'm not sure on the service history of it as I got it off the equivalent of craigslist. But I'm sure other than the ancient HDD, nothing was wrong with the laptop. I've given the laptop to a technician that's hopefully seen more apple devices. At this point, it chimes normally, lights up white, caps lock key works in recovery after a minute or two, connecting a display when caps lock works results in a recovery display(has not booted normally, assuming corrupt macOS install). Will update on what this new tech says.