How-To Geek

So, we had this old laptop that's been stored away for some time now, mainly because the charger was lost and the battery eventually lost power. However, I recently replaced it in order to try and get it booted up once more, which to my delight it did as soon as it reached 100% charge. I wiped the entire system back to its original factory settings and it seemed to work fine, allowed me to install everything that I wanted and all. However, half way through rooting through some files, it froze completely and refused to do anything at all. Shutting it down completely, I tried rebooting it and the screens back light lit, but nothing else. No logos, no noise (unless I pressed quite a few keys and it beeped rather loudly at me), and no options anywhere. I tried restarting it several times but to no avail. I left it for a week or so and came back to the same problem, this time leaving it fr a few hours, just to see if it was being extremely slow, though there was no change. One last restart and it booted up again, allowing me to use it properly, wipe it again and restart it several times to install important windows updates. However, half way through it froze again and we're back to square one. Only a backlight present. So, really, any clues as to what is wrong with it and how I can fix it? Here's the info I can gather from it:

HP Pavilion DV9000
Windows Vista Home Premium OEMAct
64-bit

Sorry for the lack of info, but any help would be appreciated!

It's stone cold on the bottom and the fans are buzzing away to themselves quietly. I gave it a good blow through anyway, but it didn't seem to have any real affect.

Does this laptop have an nVidia graphics chip (GPU)?

If so, you may be experiencing the same problem I'm having with my DV6000 series laptop.

You can read my thread on the Linux board HERE

I suspect I am going to have to get the GPU chip "re-flowed" which is basically repairing the flawed solder joints securing the GPU to the motherboard.

If you are familiar with any Linux operating systems, (Ubuntu, Mint, Puppy, etc.) you could do as I have and create a bootable CD, DVD or flash drive to operate your laptop. For some reason, Ubuntu (v11.04) will run my laptop flawlessly, but Windows locks up. I still haven't quite figured it out yet, but I think it has something to do with how the graphics are rendered. WHS has been a great help and as I stated in my thread about my issue, I'll post when I get it all figured out.

These HP laptops apparently did not have the best design when it came to heat management for the CPUs and GPUs and this causes a poor connection between the motherboard and the graphics processor. When the GPU loses connectivity, you cannot interface with the PC, so the only thing you can do is a hard shutdown. As we all know, this is bad when the PC is processing something and can cause file corruption leading to other problems.

Hope this helps.