Fixing an HP zd7000A Laptop with No Power On (In Burnaby)

I found this HP zd7000 listing on 15Nov2010. I contacted the owner. He lived near to my house. I went to meet him in the evening. He was wearing a hospital uniform seemed to be just returned from work. He showed me this zd7000 which had 256MB RAM and 60G hard drive. He told me that the power jack had problem. He wanted to remove the hard drive. I told him my purpose was reparing it for reuse by someone else. Without hard drive would add difficulty on the purpose. He kindly left the hard drive inside.

I was hoping that replacing the DC power jack would resolve the problem. After taking the laptop apart, I found the hard drive caddy was missing and it has a wrong DC power jack with additional wires to the motherboard. For safety reason, I could not use this motherboard. I found that motherboard even used ones were every expensive, over $100.

I bought a dead motherboard which had video problem and tried to reflow the GPU. It did not work. Checking the motherboard, it looked like the power chip had failed. I bought and replaced the power chip. It still did not work.

I removed the 60GB hard drive and 256MB RAM to another laptops and put this zd7000 in box and started watching the motherboard price hoping that it would drop. I had been watching for two and a half years, the motherboard price was still over $100.

On 14April2013, I had two zd7000s traded in that could rebuild one. There were parts left for me to work on this zd7000 again.

For the bad RAMs, I checked the temperature of each chip but could not identify which one had sign of problem. I attempted to reflow all the chips. Both RAMs works again and the motherboard thought to be dead has video again. I put in a 30GB hard drive with caddy and loaded the XP Windows Home according to the COA label at the bottow of the laptop. Both installation and update to SP3 were successful. I installed the missing drivers from HP website on zd7000A. Wireless, sound, video and USB ports are all working properly. Testing the battery, it still holds charge for 4 minutes.

I thought that I had to give up on this laptop. However, after waiting for two and a half years, it has chance to work again. The widescreen is big and color is good. No wonder the motherboard price is always high.

After 2 weeks, one RAM failed. The video problem came back. I replaced both RAMs.

On 2July2013, a man who lives in Burnaby was interested on it. We met in food court. He told me that he needs the parallel port of this laptop to connect to his ploter for CAD drawing. I am glad that this old laptop after almost 3 years with we can serve him again.