Fixing an HP dv9000 which Powers Up and Shuts Down in a Second (In Surrey)

The listing of this HP DV9000 had 'Dv 9315ca 17" laptop complete but no harddrive . Everything works till the motherboard dead. Battery 2hrs life'.

It looked similar to the HP DV9000 that I did a reflow on GPU which is still working at home. I picked up this DV9000 on 5Jan2012 to test another reflow. When we met, the seller opened the laptop and pressed the power button to show that the power light came out and shut down immediately.

Over the weekend, I inspected this dv9000 and found a list of issues:

• The LCD cover on the left hinge had gap. Glue was used to hold the LCD cover together.
• The left hinge inside was broken into two pieces. The plastic holding the screws to the cover were broken too.
• The motherboard had attempted reflow poorly on the GPU. The chip surface popped up. The plug next to the GPU was fried. The circuit on the motherboard near the touch pad ribbon was cut and an electronic component missing.

The motherboard could not be used. I bought one which was stated as NOT FIXED before. The motherboard looked new but the chip was fully surrounded by epoxy rather than just the corners. I removed the epoxy and did the reflow. It didn't work. I de-soldered the chip and found that the epoxy had got underneath the chip stopping the reflow.

I bought a brand new "HP DV9000 AMD Chip G6150 motherboard 09-10 enhanced 444002-001" from China which took 5 weeks to arrive. I moved the CPU over, added copper shim to the GPU and applied thermal compound to both. According to the specification of this laptop, I installed back a 160G hard drive. When I ran the recovery disks from the other dv9000 on this laptop, it was rejected. I needed to create the HP recovery partition in the other dv9000 to the hard drive first and moved it over to this dv9000. The HP recovery partition ran successfully in this dv9000 with no missing drivers. When I tested it further, I found two more issues. Firstly, the power panel lights didn't come up. I replaced the ribbon to make it working again. Secondly, the down arrow key was loose. It was due to the retainer underneath was broken. I reconnected the plastic by solder gun.

I ran the Windows and HP Updates to test the stability of the motherboard with Open Hardware Monitor running at the same time to monitor the temperature. The motherboard is good. GPU temperature has maximum 79°C when installing the updates.

The updates were completed with no errors. I also tested the battery. It dropped from 100% to 52% in 65 minutes. Battery should last for 2 hours as stated from previous owner.

I tested wireless, YouTube video and the webcam. They all passed for serving again. I posted it for selling. A nice guy from Surrey picked it up on 2July2012 at the price that I spent on this dv9000.

I am glad that this dv9000 can serve again.