[PLUG] motherboard repairs

Erik Lane eriklane at gmail.com
Sat Jul 25 05:02:45 UTC 2009


Not to totally hijack this thread, but I have a laptop with somewhat
similar symptoms that's driving me nuts!

Sometimes it will run for hours, sometimes only a few minutes, and
sometimes it won't even POST.

It is an HP ZV6000 and I've tried updating every driver I can. Problem
is that it's running Windows, so I'm not sure how much is relevant.

Here's what I've done:

Replaced RAM (this was not part of the troubleshooting, but I had
ordered it just before the symptoms started, so I put it in anyway to
see if that would help. Nope.)

Then I tore the thing all apart and found wads of dust/lint buildup
inside on the heat radiating fins. I removed that and put it back
together. This made quite a difference and I was good for a couple
weeks.

It started to get worse so I went and got some heat sink paste and
re-did the CPU to heat sink connection. I didn't have any before, so I
just scraped some from the edges back to the middle. This again seemed
to help for a few days, but then it started failing again.

The past couple days it has gotten ridiculous, where it won't get past
POSTing or at the most it would fail after a few minutes. I got out a
couple live CDs and played around with them. Damn Small Linux ran
great on it for 45 minutes, so then I put in the Ubuntu 9.04 live
CD/installer. It got most of the way, and then started failing with
all kinds of errors about reading the media and sr0. I ran the CD
check from the boot menu and it reported that it was good. I decided
to try booting to windows, since DSL had done so well, and it worked
great. This was getting pretty late, and I fell asleep, but when I
woke an hour or so later windows was still up and running. Though I
had pulled out the wireless card, since that and the hard drive seemed
to be the only things that DSL wouldn't have been using when it was
working so well. So at this point I thought I had solved it and had a
bad wireless card.

This morning I tried Damn Small Linux again and it would get to
various points before crapping out. Though after 5 tries it managed to
boot all the way only to lock up on me after I tried doing much of
anything with it. So it's not the wireless card, I guess.

Could it be my fans? Is there any way to intelligently track it down?
I *really* don't want to just throw parts at it, that gets expensive
in a hurry. I have Hiren's Boot CD, but all the tests I've run on it
have passed with no problems, so it doesn't seem to be helping.

If anyone has any helpful pointers for what I should try next, I'd
LOVE to hear them. I'm willing to install Linux on it and destroy the
Windows that's on there if there are troubleshooting tools to use. My
wife used this for classes and needed some video editing stuff, so I
didn't really mess with it much, but we just got her a desktop to use
since this is failing all the time so now I'm pretty much free to do
whatever. (Though there are a few pics I need to recover from the
drive for her, first.)

At this point I don't even know what to Google to get a good answer.
I've tried various combinations over the past 3 months trying to solve
this and spent *way* too much time chasing dead ends. But we like the
laptop, so if it's still salvageable I'd like to try. I'm pretty
handy, but if the answer is the motherboard then I'm probably not
willing to put that much into it at this point. It's old enough that
if I have to spend too much money I should just get a newer model,
especially since OSU will require me to have a fairly recent one for
my engineering studies next year.

Thanks!!
Erik



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