Fixing an HP dv8000 with Video Problem (In Richmond)
This HP dv8320ca laptop has 17' widescreen. I picked it up at $50 from a nice house 5 minute drive away from where I live.
The owner invited me to go inside his pretty house and showed me the laptop that had video card problem to display high resolution. It could only run on a default window video driver on low resolution.
When I took it home, I found that the recovery partition was still inside the hard drive. I called up the recovery program which ran through successfully. When it was booted up again, the screen flashed so quick that I could not read anything and restarted again and again. I used a digital camera to capture the display. Although I could read the display but it didn't tell me anything that I could understand.
I opened up the laptop which was a bit difficult. I broke the slim plastic part on where the remote control was inserted in. I cleaned up the fan and found that the Nvidia video chip was part of the motherboard. I don't know how to fix electronic and had to buy a motherboard at $150 for it.
After installing a working motherboard, the laptop works perfectly again. The display is very good. I also installed Windows 7 (RC) on it to try out Windows 7 until March when the RC version expired.
The silvery color paint on the tough pad came off and developed a white spot at the center of it. It looked very ugly to me. I tried to paint the white spot but it didn't match color. At the end, I scrubbed away all the paint on the touch pad which works without any paint on it and will not have the same problem again.
The laptop looks good and works good again. It has a new home in Richmond in March 2010. For the old motherboard, I put it to eBay for a starting bid of $1. It had a single bid and went to the U.S.