Fixing an HP dv6000 with No Video (In Alberta)
This HP dv6391eu entertainment laptop has an Arabic keyboard. The owner bought it in Middle East and carried it back to Vancouver for his daughter.
When I first met the owner outside his house, he was very eager to show me the laptop and told me the story. He invited me to his basement and told me that the laptop had been working well for his daughter over 2 years but the video did not show up on one day. He kept the RAM but leaving the hard drive inside. I promise him that I would clear all her daughter's data when the laptop could be started up again.
It is a very sleek laptop and beautiful in design. The wide screen, built-in webcam, wireless, Bluetooth and card reader make it a fully loaded entertainment laptop. I opened up the laptop very carefully this time and did not break anything. The fan was clogged with dust. It has a Nvidia video chip which I suspected causing the problem. I did not buy a new motherboard this time. I did a research in internet and found a lot of solutions, such as holding the power switch for 15 seconds, covering the fan, burning the video chip by lighter and even blowing hot air to the chip by hair dryer. I finally figured out my own way to just heat up the chip area with temperature just enough to melt the solder to reflow the video chip. It worked and the HP logo came back on boot up.
When the video was back, I put in copper shims to CPU and the 2 chips covered by the heatsink with silver thermal compound in between to lower the temperature. After I assembled the laptop back, I ran the Nvidia performance test program to stress test the laptop for an hour and used a freeware to log the CPU and GPU temperature. Both were very stable.
I cleaned up the laptop body, added a Remote Control with new battery, put in 2G RAM as in product specification and restored the factory image from the recovery partition. As promise to the previous owner, data were totally cleared.
After testing the laptop to ensure that it is fully up and running again, I found a new home for it in Alberta Dustin Church for $199.
