WHY YOU DIE ON ME NOW?

February 17, 2011 9:17 AM

Have I killed my HP dv6700 dead? Whenever I plug in the AC adapter, the LED panel lights up like this, with the speaker LED flickering purple. Hitting the power button makes the screen flash intermittently. No response beyond that.

Began as a screen issue after i took it out of sleep mode. After opening it up and checking for loose cables and finding none, I put it back together and now this happens.

I've had this thing for about 2 1/2 years and the warranty is long over. I've tinkered with it before to replace parts and everything was fine and dandy up till now. The tech I spoke with indicated that it would be $400 + tax to send it in. Screw that.

posted by Throw away your common sense and get an afro! to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

It's possible that your battery and/or power brick are bad (I've seen a bad battery cause power brick overload on several laptops requiring that both be replaced, or at least, the AC power brick). To check, unplug the machine from AC, remove the battery, plug it in to AC again, and see if it will boot. If it doesn't, take the power brick to any computer repair shop, and have them check it for output voltage and current within spec (most shops will do this for free, as a preliminary to selling you a new generic power brick, for somewhere between $50 and $100, depending on your wattage needs). If it does boot normally, you've proved that the battery is bad (many lithium batteries have about a 2 year "lifespan" in normal use, and usually fail when one or more internal cells in the battery pack fail. They can't be economically repaired.)

Note that running a laptop without the internal battery installed means you'll have no AC line or "brownout" protection. Unless you connect to an external UPS, or replace the battery with a new one, you should be careful of running the machine 24x7, or during thunderstorms, etc. when you can lose AC power briefly, risking scrambling your disk file system.
posted by paulsc at 1:33 PM on February 17, 2011

Response by poster: The battery died 6 months ago. I've been running it on AC power since then.
posted by Throw away your common sense and get an afro! at 2:25 PM on February 17, 2011

Best answer: My dv6000 just died a similar death.

Basically, HP switched to a lead free solder which had a lower melting temp than standard, and used that solder to attach the nVidia graphics chip to the laptop. These graphics chips are notorious for running hot, they melt the solder and essentially disconnect themselves from the motherboard and boom, no laptop. A terrible heatsink design doesn't help.

There are lots of internet forums that say the problem can be fixed by using a heatgun to reflow the solder, but when I tried it with said laptop it worked for at most a week before failing again. Memail me if you want to try it and I'll give you instructions.
posted by zug at 2:40 PM on February 17, 2011

I have seen this happen on no fewer than three HP laptops in the last two years. I've been wondering about the cause, thanks zug.
posted by Xoebe at 1:48 PM on February 18, 2011

Response by poster: A friend and I have managed to get it booting up again, but it seems the screen is gone and this machine is just too old to put any more effort into. Think I might just opt for a new one.

Thanks for the offer anyway, zug. I'll give you best answer for that.
posted by Throw away your common sense and get an afro! at 7:01 PM on March 2, 2011