Fixing an HP dv9000 with Broken Hinge and No Video (In Surrey)

This dv9723ca was stated as ""An HP Pavillion dv9000 that no longer works . The monitor doesn't turn on. One of its hinges is broken and we had the ram and hard drives taken out."

I picked it up on 30Mar2012. At home, I checked this laptop for missing parts. Besides RAM and hard drive, it needed AC adapter, hard drive caddy and adapter. I contacted the owner to see if she still had those. She found them and provided to me.

For the broken left hinge, I found that it was broken at the lower part. From an earlier dv9000 which had hinge broken at the upper part, I leveraged the lower part and assembled the left hinge. For the mouse button with silver paint scratched away, I replaced both.

For no video, my instinct of the problem is on the video chip. I disassembled the dv9000 and found the fan was fully clogged with dust. The video chip had not been attempted for fixing. It was good for me to test another reflow. Unlike my last reflow, this video chip was almost fully surrounded by epoxy. I needed to remove all the epoxy first so that soldering flux could flow underneath the video chip before I could reflow. I used hot air rework station to reflow the video chip on 21Apr2012. The video was back. The gap between the video chip and heat sink is around 1 mm thick. I cut a copper shim from a copper sheet with an appropriate thickness and applied the thermal compound to both CPU and the video chip.

Following the specification of this dv9723ca, I put in 2 GB RAM. I tested this laptop on running ubuntu from DVD drive. The ubuntu was loaded successfully and the dv9723ca was running good.

To check the stability of the reflow, I tested it again a month later. I put in a 160GB hard drive to it which was picked up by a student on 16May2013.