[PLUG] motherboard repairs

Isaac Michael isaacem at gmail.com
Sat Jul 25 05:32:33 UTC 2009


Hello Erik,

Thinking about the symptoms you provided it could be multiple issues

1- Could be overheating issue
- Does your computer freeze after being on for certain amount of time?
- Dose it freeze when you load something on it, regardless windows or
linux..specifically Graphics (video etc,) that seem to put some load on the
cpu

2- Could be hardware failure
a) Motherboard
That will be an expensive part and you better of getting new laptop
b) Ram
You said you replaced the memory...
How many chips did u get? can u test with single chip at a time
c) Ram slot  (which i have suspicious that it is your issue)
In most cases could be slot # 1 or # 1 Try to test with a single memory chip
in every slot and see which one will fail and which one will work for you
d) CPU
That is expensive and you probably get new laptop better


Hope that helps,

Isaac

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 10:02 PM, Erik Lane <eriklane at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Isaac Michael



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