Fixing an HP tx1000 with No Video (In New Jersey)

I used laptops a lot but never had a chance to use tablet until I picked up this HP tx1416ca tablet which had no video on Nov 15, 2010. The first owner told me that his wife didn't use it too often. From the pristine conditions, i.e. no scratches on the body and no shinny keys on keyboard, I could tell that it was true. So, it looked like that the HP tablet had a certain life time irrespective to usage. They removed the hard drive which contained their data.

When I returned home, I switched on the power. The tablet indicator lights were on except no video. My testing instinct told me that it was the GPU problem again. I opened up the hard drive compartment and found that the hard drive caddy and screws were gone with the hard drive.

To restore this tablet, I needed to reflow the GPU video chip and installed the hard drive. According to the product specification, it should have a 250GB (5400 rpm) hard drive. Since the tablet was in pristine condition, I bough a new 250GB (7400 rpm) faster Hitachi hard drive and the caddy for it.

I opened up the tablet. The difficult part to disassemble were the power button cover and the motherboard which needed patience to remove them without breaking any parts. I cleaned up the tablet fan and did a reflow on the GPU in controlled temperature. When GPU was cooled down, I applied the silver thermal compound to both the CPU and the GPU. On GPU, I added a copper shim. When I turned on the tablet again, the video was back.

After a month, the hard drive caddy arrived. I tried to use the HP Windows Vista Home Premium recovery discs from the dv9000 that I fixed before to installed the Operations System. The recovery disc didn't allow installing to another HP model. I needed to get around it. After I installed the Windows Vista Home Premium, all HP software were there except the following that I needed to download and installed manually:

• audio driver
• video driver
• finger print driver and software

I tested the battery which ran over 1.5 hours before the tablet shut down automatically. The only missing were the pen and the HP recovery disc which could not be generated from the hard drive. They would cost $20 and $45 respectively.

The reflow was done on Nov 15, 2010. I installed the HW Monitor software to check the GPU temperature. The maximum was 70°C. We had been using it for Skype with my daughter. On 23Jan2011, I bought a stylus. When I calibrated the screen, the lower right corner had beep which did not allow exact calibration. Checking the internet, it was problem on Windows Vista that is fixed in Windows 7.

After passing my testing, it left on 14Feb2011 to New Jersey to serve a new user.