HP Pavillion DV2500 Nightmares over heating, GPU and CPU running hot

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
Hello,
I had the same problems as mentioned. Some background; I have never bought a laptop but have built many desktops, beginning with an Abit IT5H. My son needed a laptop for school so this purchase was a first. I special ordered a DV2500 with upgrades to the cpu, hdd and video at substantial extra cost.

The first time the screen went it lost blue but was still readable and under warranty. HP repaired it for free. A couple moths later, 2 weeks after the warranty expired, I got multiple boot screens (6). HP wanted $450 to repair. I bought and installed a repaired mobo for $150 and it has run for the past 6 months without issue. No telling how long it will last. Bottom line, I will NEVER buy another thing that HP sells. This is an obvious design flaw that they are very well aware of but have chosen to ignore. Buyer beware.
 
And I forgot to say...cause I don't live in the US (I'm from the Netherlands Antilles) it is not so easy to send it back to Best Buy to fix it...so i had to take measures and install Windows 7 myself to repair some of the errors...

It would be very great if they can replace this product...It gave ma a lot of headache...😉
 
I have had the same problem with the HP Pavilion dv2500. It is a terrible computer. While under warranty I had to have the mike, chassy and mousepad replaced. Just after the warranty expired the motherboard went. HP wants $400 to fix their faulty product. Do not buy HP products!

 


i had the same problem on my partners Dv2500, he had already paid the tech guys £230 for a new board back in may last year, i have since found out after stripping the laptop down to just componants that the GPU and CPU are the cause of the problem.sticky pads are used as heat disipators and there is no Compund what so ever, i covered the CPU and GPU in compound and put the stickers back on, then came the mission of putting it back together..... WHAT A LOAD OF OLD S**T. I cant believe how badley this machine is built... oh well at least they are refunding the £230 now, next job is to get them to replace the whole thing and ill move over to apple i think, they build there cpu and gpc on the same chip to produce less heat..... fab idea!!!
 
Hi Guys and Gals,
I have just read through the whole of the discussion on the HP 2000 series problems with great interest - because - yes I have exactly the same problem. Stand by for a complete report. I have plenty to say and will prepare my report off line before posting. I beleive I have identified the problem and it is definately with the design. It is clear to me that HP have a responsibility to replace these faulty laptops FOC even though they are out of warranty. They are clearly not listening to the complaints - or more truthfully CHOOSING to not listen.
Watch this space for a full follow up.
 
HP Pavillion dv2500 Laptop Problems
This report is ‘Rayzers’ follow up of my previous contribution as promised.

Background. My son bought one of these in 2007 for his business. It ran OK for a short time but it became noticeable that it was always running hot. It was used largely for when my son left work and needed the information to work on when at home. The office is equipped with multiple PC’s so it was not a hard worked device.
Just about the time when the warranty ran out it started crashing. It would suddenly and without warning just shut down and the screen went blank. He could not afford to be without a laptop computer so just went out and bought another (A Fujitsu Amilo that I now have). The HP Pavillion dv2500 was retained as a home laptop and continued to be unreliable. It was used – literally – as a laptop and within minutes would burn your leg. Then it was cast aside as being useless and written off as a total loss, with a resolve to never buy another HP machine.

Attempts to Repair. Before December 2009 I offered to try and fix the HP Pavillion 2500. I am a Professional Engineer experienced in the design of all sorts of products and well versed in investigating, testing and report writing. It was running Vista. These are my initial findings. It would start up, behaving normally. Within a short time it became unusually hot. Out of sympathy for the components I switched it off.
After it cooled I ran it again and ran a Hard Drive test using a third party disk facility. It indicated a potentially failing HD fault. I continued checking in this way and found that Vista regularly hung on the start up screen with the gold bar and required re-booting. Even when it did start up it would not run anything for more than a few minutes that required an internet connection, or even a simple application like a Word document. Then it would either freeze or shut down. I then started to set the laptop on top of a freezer block covered with a towel, as I was acutely aware of the damage from overheating. The cooling effect of this was quick and effective but not very practical for everyday use. HP please note!!!!
I removed the HD and connected it externally to the PC with a SATA adapter, and extracted as much data and other files into a archive just in case. I then tried to re-install Vista without success. My son had lost the original disks that came with the machine. Knowing that HP would ask a small fortune for new full system disks and having designated the HP Pavillion dv2500 as a write-off I declined this approach as it would be throwing money away and I am not into that approach. I downloaded a Vista Recovery disk. This did not work. It went so far then asked for the code. Of course this was lost with the original disks.

Re-installing the OS. In order to eliminate the possibility of a Vista system fault I tried to install Win XP. To eliminate any further problems that could be connected with the infamous Vista OS I re-formatted the original HD externally using [Start-Settings-Control Panel-Administrative Tools-Computer Management-Storage-Disk Management(Local)] and started from scratch. We all now know from the forums that it is not possible to install earlier versions of Windows on a SATA HD without complicated procedures, and even then ending up with a machine that would have issues related to drivers, software and the lack of any support whatsoever from HP. Anyway I did try. I found the ‘f6flpy32’ files and slipstreamed these into a copy of Win XP Pro using ‘nLite’ a free software facility that works well. Win XP started to install, stopped at the request at F6 to load other drivers. These had been prepared on a floppy. I then used a external floppy drive to permit this. (You can find these quite cheaply on e-bay). The various drivers were accepted and the install continued. It looked as if I had been successful with the install until right at the end when it came up ‘Windows will now start’ that it crashed out with a blue screen warning that it had been ended to protect the computer (not the exact wording as I cannot now re-check it).

So now I had a machine without a OS and reluctant to make HP richer by purchasing a full system disk. The answer came to this in the form of Linux. Look for ‘Ubuntu’ and download the latest version as a image file then burn a CD to end up with a bootable copy of Ubuntu Linux. This worked perfectly and I now had a working machine once more running Ubuntu. (As an aside, I have to say I am impressed with the Ubuntu OS (not the HP laptop!!!!). It seems to be a no frills clean OS with loads of free software in the offing). With this assurance a new High Capacity battery and a new 320GB HD was ordered since I was aware that the HD may fail without warning. After a few days I told my son he could have his HP Pavillion 2500 back as long as he was happy to just run Ubuntu. Next morning I started it up again just make sure it was OK. I got the six screens and nothing else. Try as I may I could not get it to do anything else. I assumed at the time this was a fault with the video chip, or the failing Hard Drive.

Major Decision. From the forum I picked up on the poor transfer of heat problem and this pointed me to the next job. It was a full strip down just to get at the fan and the heat sink that is supposed to take away the heat from the processors. What a procedure! With the help of the downloaded service manual, the laptop had to be completely stripped down. Not difficult if you are adventurous - fiddly due to poor design. All external components (battery, HD, Wireless card etc), Keyboard, Screen, Top cover (under the keyboard), Speakers, Wiring harness that is threaded through the top cover, and finally the motherboard that carries the fan. Surely this could have been designed so the fan could have been accessed through the base like the HD? That would have made servicing relatively easy and placed the fan in the right place i.e in the base so air could be draw up through the machine. The ventilation holes in the base are not adequate and do not allow sufficient air to circulate around the components. As I removed the fan the pads on top of the two processors just fell off. They were not in contact with the chip or the copper heat pipe. I cleaned off any residue and re-seated the two components onto the heat pipe using a high quality (claimed that is) silver thermal compound from ‘Antec’. At the time I thought what a poor method this must be to rely on a pad of what looks like plasticine to remove the heat. What is wrong with a good old fashioned aluminium extrusion with a large contact area?

The Root of the Problem.This is where I believe the problem arises. When I removed it the fan was loaded with dust that could not help with the cooling but this would be impossible for the average user to check and clean. The fan is a rather miserable affair that does not rotate very fast and seems to struggle to push sufficient air out of the grid on the back of the laptop. Any air that does emerge can only be described as warm, and that is when the computer is very hot. This is clearly indicating that the cooling fan and heat sinks are not doing their job. The method used to extract the heat is a copper strip or flattened pipe that is in contact with the two processors via the heat transfer pads and paste. The pipe has to pass from the site of the processors to the exit grid, a distance of approx 200mm. Although copper is an excellent conductor of heat it will also radiate heat. This heat is pouring off the copper strip into the inside of the laptop before it can be effectively be extracted to the outside. The result is that all components are overheating. It does seem from the complaints in this forum that you are lucky to get past the warranty period before the laptop dies from over heating.

Results of my efforts. I re-installed Ubuntu and it ran intermittently for two days then kept crashing and indicated that the HD was faulty. I removed this and connected it externally to the PC but could not see it under ‘My Computer’ The battery was also dead. The new battery and hard drive had now arrived so these were installed at considerable cost. Ubuntu was installed on the new HD and it ran for two days. It would start up but kept crashing. After two days the ‘six screens’ came up on start-up and it will now not do anything else. Now it will not work at all.

What Next? I am disgusted with this laptop and surprised that HP have not been castigated in the press for selling a laptop with such poor design features and reliability. It does seem that bad publicity is the only way to shock some companies into taking positive action. I have spent many wasted hours, and invested in a new HD and battery to eliminate these from the equation. I have installed what is a reliable OS in Ubuntu.

HP are very dismissal about any accusations and have buried their head in the sand. You cannot find anything relating to problems with the 2000 series laptops in their customer support. They have not offered any help to the army of complaining customers. They have designed a laptop that looks great but inside is another story. I believe the overheating is entirely due to a totally inadequate system of cooling and HP should be prepared to replace any laptop that has died – but not with one of the same model.

Discussion and Related Experience.I have a Technics AV Receiver that is the centre of my sound system. This excellent piece of kit runs very hot in normal use as supplied (the power rating is about 350watts so understable). It does have a cooling fan but this only operates at high volume levels. It has always been a known problem but one that I only found out after owning it. The solution was simple. I placed a small 12v computer fan on top of the case over the ventilation holes, and powered it with a external battery pack. The fan was set to draw away heat rather than force air in. Now the whole case is cool. All I have to do now is fit a more permanent fan that comes on when the amp is powered up.The air emerging from the fan is hot. I mention this because it is a very similar problem – too much heat and insufficient extraction. Whilst Ubuntu was still running I positioned this same fan at the rear of the laptop behind the vent. Within approx 30 minutes it brought the temp down by 10 degrees C. That is with a fan simply placed behind the vent. Therefore showing that an efficient fan with ducting could work so much better. Even so the whole cooling system is hopelessly inefficient and did not ever work from the word GO. The HP 2000 range of laptops all suffer from this fault. It is just a matter of time (Like one year!!!) before vital components break down from excessive heat. I believe that is what has happened in my case. The computer has died from an initial design fault – albeit with a one year time delay – and I consider it should be replaced as being unfit for the purpose for which it was sold.

Other HP Products Owned. Personally I have owned many HP products in the past including pre-computer calculators such as the HP35, the programmable HP67 and HP41CV. Also two printers. I have no complaints about these but the HPdv2500 is just not fit for purpose. HP quickly dropped the Pavillion dv2000 range that must be a sign it was a headache to them. I own five laptops ranging from a Compaq Contura 400c, two IBM’s (380Z and 600X) and a the Fujitsu Siemens AMILO (fully restored after being dropped from a height). Most of these are now quite old and are ex company laptops so have had a hard life. They have been upgraded and continue to run cool and are problem free. I use them on boats for navigation and entertainment so they have to be reliable. The HP Pavillion dv2500, even if I could get it running again I would not trust for this, like many others, that will now include any other HP product. HP are shooting themselves in the foot on this one.

So come on HP do the right thing. Face up to the fact that this is a design ****-up and be prepared to replace them even though they are out of warranty. The public do not expect to buy a computer that will only last for a year. Compare that with your new car with a one-year warranty. Then find that the car becomes totally un-useable just as the warranty runs out. This would be considered wholly unacceptable.



 
I have the exact same problem!

i bought the DV2500 laptop in october of 2008 for my wife as she "liked its looks"

being more practical, I bought a Lenovo thinkpad for myself (which runs absolutely flawlessly)

the Hp DV2500 has always had issues, it would sometimes turn itself off with no warning, and as a result, files would usually end up corrupted, the amount of times vista was reinstalled because of corrupt files due to this laptop shutting off, was ridiculous, not to mention the amount of personal files and work that was lost!

in the past 3 months (when the machine is now out of warranty) the machine has experienced more severe problems, namely the laptop will display not 6 screens but a very scrambled pattern of multiple coloured pixels on the screen, it is just very garbled and unreadable. when the machine is turned off and on again, the HP splash screen is not shown, instead a blank screen is shown... i can see the hard drive light ticking away as if its loading windows... again, within a few minutes, the laptop turns itself off again.

i must mention here, that like almost every other post here, this laptop runs EXTREMELY hot! i am not talking the kind of hot that will make you move your hand after a few minutes because it gets uncomfortable, i am talking about so hot that you cannot even touch the palm rest as it is red hot! like the OP, i can smell the melting of the internal components and plastics!

like Rayzer has written very extensively in his posts above, this laptop has a very poor design. the vent at the back blows only mildly warm air, so the majority of the heat generated is being circulated inside the machine, causing the heating issue. the vista sticker on the underside is now unreadable as it has practically burnt black, one of the underside panels has actually warped with the heat and is now slightly bowed.

the processor is a T7300 C2D and the usual NV8 GPU with the thermal pad which is worse than useless.

Rayzer also pointed out above that he used a self made fan and placed it a the back of the vent in the laptop and this somewhat stablised the laptop.

unknowingly, whilst 'enjoying' a fault free day with the laptop the other day, only for it to fail the very next day, i investigated what could have been different.. i discovered that my wife had a tabletop fan on her desk behind the laptop which was keeping her cool... and it must have been dissapating a lot of the air inside the laptop via the rear vent also, which helped keep the laptop "trouble free" for that day.

hardly a full time solution to an item designed for portability!

i used to work for HP offering technical support and they were supposed to give us 3 weeks training on the items we would be supporting... we were on the phones just 24 hours after we were hired! my previous I.T. skills got me up to standard, but my colleagues who joined with me were left to educate themselves on the product that HP couldn't be bothered to educate them on... so customers were receiving very little in the way of support.

the bottom line is, with so many issues surrounding the DV series of laptops and possibly other models, HP should be made to acknowledge that, yes, this is a design issue, and yes, it is their fault. No company is too big to ignore what is obviously a world wide problem (I'm in Australia), and HP's persistence to ignore this issue, will hopefully prove to be as serious a flaw as this red hot piece of melted crap that I paid a lot of money for!
 
Update from Rayzer. 25 Jan 2010
Since my last post I have contacted the CEO Mr Mark Hurd, and copied the entire content of my long letter of complaint. I did think that this may possibly convince HP that there actually is a problem with the Pavillion dv2500 laptop.

Apparently HP seem to believe either there is nothing wrong with the design whatsoever, or they believe that if they continue to ignore their customers who unwittingly purchased one of these joke laptops that the serious problem will just go away and we will all buy another HP Laptop. What do you think?

I believe that we all make mistakes at some time. No one is perfect and it must be expected to happen at some time. It takes courage and honesty to admit to a mistake. It may cost to do so but the rewards will be in the form of trust in the future.

Anyway I wasn't completely ignored. Mr Hurd decided that it was not important enough for him to reply to (like the future of the company being compromised?) - so he passed that onto a call centre in South Africa (who apparently deal with Europe).

I was telephoned in the UK by a pleasant lady who had the unpleasant task of informing me that HP would only provide repairs if the product was still in warranty. Outside of that they would be prepared to repair it at my cost. There is no official recognition by HP that there is a fault and they continue to behave as if everything is normal.

I find it hard to believe that any responsible company that released a product onto the market that was found to have a serious design fault, would fail to protect their reputation in such an instance.

We are all aware what a limited time warranty means and accept it in good faith. However when the product in question becomes totally unuseable just after the warranty expires, or would require a major part of the original purchase price to put it right, then this becomes unacceptable.

Accordingly I will not send any further correspondence to Mr Hurd as I consider he has missed a point somewhere.

So I have gone to the next step and sent my complaint to the HP Board of Directors, and await their reply.

If this falls on stoney ground there are plenty of other avenues to explore, that may prove embarrassing for HP.

If anyone wishes to make contact with HP you can use the following links.

The CEO Hewlett Packard, through the HP website. This a pro-forma type of reply and is a bit restrictive but it should reach his office. Even if the reply does not happen or you are fobbed off to a call centre, at least you will have made your point.

You can contact the Board of Directors directly by e-mail via :-Rosemarie Thomas
Secretary to the Board of Directors
3000 Hanover Street, MS 1050
Palo Alto, CA 94304
e-mail: bod@hp.com

Good Luck
 
Thanks, Rayzer.

Feel free to add my email address to any petition or letter you submit, if that will help punch the point across to HP. Perhaps we should create a list of unhappy customers who all have suffered the same problem?
 
Same story here...
Australian dv2637TX bought november 2007. these days always difficult to run, BIOS screen always 6 mirrored screens.

IS there any fix for these except changing the motherboard???
 
Here is a reason to believe in god, heavan and hell. There is a special place in hell where engineers will spend all of eternity repairing the products they designed.

The laptops that need to be completely disassembled to clean or replace their cooling system. The cars that need the exhaust manifold removed to change the oil. Etc.
 
Hi all, I made a stab at solving my overheating problem. Somehow got the thing back together with only 3 extra screws...😀

My DV 2500 w/ Turion X2 has run strong for about 20 min, GPU is running at a steady 70C and both cores at about 50C with firefox, bittorrent, skype and a few other apps running. I dont play games but I tested it with an intense statistical montecarlo simulation from my studies. The final step on which involved plotting about 5 million data points. It didn't break 74C on GPU or 55C on the cpu cores. So far so good?



Here is what I did:

Cleaned off the thermal pad from the head sink, cleaned off the old thermal grease. HP put way too much on and I couldnt get all it off the outer part but did get the processor itself perfectly clean using isopropyl alcohol. New thermal grease on the CPU and GPU. Then I placed a 50 Swedish öre coin (<2mm) on top of the GPU. This coin is 93% copper, much higher than modern U.S. pennies but otherwise looks similar. An old US penny from the early 60s or 50s which are almost pure copper, would probably work too. Maybe a Euro cent would work too.


Here is a lousy picture of what I did

Who know, maybe it will *** the bed tomorrow morning. I won't buy a HP for years if ever again. Too bad about this too, no way anyone would have known it would die from reading review back in 07 or 08 because this problem takes over a year to develope. Oh well just a machine.
 
Hello daniel,
I am having the same issue of 6 screens upon booting 🙁 . I sent for repair as i have the extended warranty and i got back unrepaired saying the issue is because i have ants inside the system which is strange as I dont have ants in my house an I dont even take it out except for library once a month or so, which I do in my carand there are no ants in my backpack either. i am not an engineer and have never opened a laptop before.

I am planning to talk to case manager this week, please suggest.

thanks in advance.
Sid

 
Hello Rohith,
I am having the same issue of 6 screens upon booting 🙁 . I sent for repair as i have the extended warranty and i got back unrepaired saying the issue is because i have ants inside the system which is strange as I dont have ants in my house an I dont even take it out except for library once a month or so, which I do in my carand there are no ants in my backpack either. i am not an engineer and have never opened a laptop before.

I am planning to talk to case manager this week, please suggest.

thanks in advance.
Sid
 
Hey Rohith,
dv2600 cto with nvidia chipset bought in 2007 and have 3 years warranty.

serial# 2CE7460L2L

I also get the 6 screens upon booting. Please let me know the next step.

Tanks,
Sid



 
Thanks for taking it up Rayzer. I get 6 screens at bootup and when i sent for repair, i got back a ridiculous response saying I have ants inside the system, as though the ants would be happy being baked in the red heat. Feel free to add my hp dv2600 serial# 2CE7460L2L as well to ur petition.

Thanks,
Sid


 
I am having some of these same exact issues with my husbands laptop I took it too the GEEK morons at my local best buy and even they couldnt figure it out. When I first took it to them the only issues was it over heating and when I would turn it on it would get to the windows welcome screen and not go any further so I took it to geek squad only to have them tell me it needs a clean install of an OS due to registry errors. So I took back the laptop and a 120.00 version of win. 7 and went home I get home to install it myself and now the display is black nothing what so ever and the hard drive light would not come on so I called them and went through all the steps they told me to do draining the battery and so forth, still nothing so I bring it back in today and hand it to the tech and he turns it on and the start up screen appears he did this once in front of me and twice in the back saying it was working for him might need a new power cord and hard drive so I lay down another 220 for those on top of the 70 and 120 and get home to install the new hard drive and the screen is doing it again and it shuts off after 2 min. I am sooo sick of this piece of **** I bought it for him 2 years ago along with my gateway desktop my gateway is running beautifully with not one issue and his laptop is now a paperweight. I am going to call HP myself and see what can be done as I have called in the past due to blue screen of death. Here is my info
HP Pavilion dv2500
s/n 2CE8103BX7
Service dv2845se
I will keep checking in here. ~Jenn
 
Same six screen probs here also..... (Australia)

HP Pavilion dv2500 is the equivalent of Microsoft's XBox 360 which have a 54.2% failure rate ATM due to poor design.
 
This is Rayzer again. Sorry for the inactivity but I have been busy trying to harass or embarass HP. After many e-mails to the Board of Directors in Palo Alto CA USA I have just become more and more annoyed with HP.
I sent e-mails repeating my complaints every day for about 10 days. I never even got acknowledgements or a peep out of them. I am amazed that HP will employ such ignorant irresponsible people to run their company.

So the dv2500 has just sat there gathering dust. You may recall I bought a new HD and heavy duty (the double thickness one) battery after I had stripped it down and reseated the processors.

Today I had an idea that I just had to try. I thought that if maybe the chip is not making good contact with the mobo then it would be worth investigating.

It was a quick fix. Just remove the battery, remove the 3 screws that hold the keyboard (they have a small icon of a keyboard close to them). I then applied finger pressure on the metal shield behind where the fan outlet is situated i.e. over the area where the processors are mounted.

Bingo! it worked. Everything came back normal. Ubuntu worked without problems, internet was fast and normal. I left it on for about an hour and the air coming out of the fan was getting quite warm approaching hot.

Then the acid test. Turn it off and leave for an hour and restart. You guessed - 6 screens and jumbled characters. So I have given up again in disgust, swearing literally that I was spending too much time on this heap of trash that HP should recognise as such and do the honourable thing.

I think we all have to accept that the shysters who are running HP have no integrity. There method of dealing with a problem is to ignore the customers who complain hoping they will give up.

When I have cooled down and come off the ceiling I may have another attempt at sorting it. My next plan is to get it stripped once more down to the mobo (sorry 'motherboard' - not trying to confuse) and see if I can remove the offending chips and reseat them. I seem to have unwittingly run into the fact that just by pressing on the plate above the chips that it worked - OK only for a short time. Maybe a more permanent reseating will work. Will get back again.

Is there anyone out there knowledgeable in the legal steps that could be taken to bring this into the public domain and have HP exposed and forced to be responsible???

For me it is no longer just a case of getting the laptop working - I have others much better than the dv2500. It is now more a principle to get HP to accept they have made a big mistake in the design.

Keep sending your comments.
Rayzer
 
Most HP Laptops between 2005 to early 2009 are total garbage and DIE REAL FAST.

I have not herd of a single HP laptop from that date range that has lived passed 2 years or have not been sent to RMA at least once.

Quite funny my employer gave me a Compaq laptop.. CQ50 with a Turion CPU and Geeforce8200... still alive and running flawlessly after a painful XP Downgrade.


If you want to buy an HP Product.... MAKE SURE IT'S A LASERJET !!!
 
i have dv2700 artist edition and i am having the same problem random video corruption even at post. mirror windows and weird videos and system halt etc. laptop is heating. i cleaned the heatsink etc but problem is still. first it starts random shutdowns then one day video is corrupted.. i have to restart it many times to get right video...
 
Hi everyone,

I am having the same issues with my wife's dv6500, however I would like to go into a bit of my history with HP first.

I have owned quite a few HP products and so have my family members. These products have ranged from printers to desktops to laptops etc. I am using a HP printer as we speak. I have always considered HP to be a reputable company and I have endorsed their products in the past. However, I will no longer continue to recommend HP products to anyone if this problem is not taken care of. I will also warn any potential buyers of the horror stories that I have read about and also been through myself with this laptop.

I bought my wife a HP laptop (I would have to look back at old reciepts to possibly find the model number), but it looked exactly like the dv6500. She began having display problems with the machine within a few months. A day or so after the problems started, the screen went black and would not come back on. The machine was sent to HP for repair under warranty. HP wiped out my wife's hard drive during their "repair" without any warning to us. At the time I had assumed the lcd had went out or that the cable had went bad. Looking back on the whole thing, I doubt that was the case.

After receiving the laptop back, things were fine for a few months. Low and behold however, same problem again. This time HP said they could not fix the machine and replaced it with a dv6500 (which oddly says dv6000 on the lcd molding?). I was not very happy about this at the time because the new machine came with Windows Vista. Vista was very buggy at that point in time and the previous machine had Windows XP which I preffered. HP said that they could not help with this matter however.

Shortly after receiving the dv6500, this machine also started experiencing problems. The problems include the following:
1: frequent shutdowns with no warning out of the blue (a few times a week)
2: running extremely hot (my wife could not set the machine on her lap because it would literally burn her skin)
3: file corruption (which is likely due to the extreme temperatures)
4: cd's and dvd's having a hard time burning/playing at times (also likely because of the heat problem)
5: The list goes on and on, this machine has been horrible.

My wife and family have lived with all of these shortcomings for quite some time. If my daughter wants to play a game, she has to put a fan blowing underneath the laptop (she knows the rule). My wife must set the laptop on a hard surface and stay in a cool environment if she wants to use the web (otherwise she must get the fan also). For a portable machine, this thing sure does lock a user down. Perhaps HP could over us all free box fans that we could blow across the laptop to help cool it. I have done hard drive scans and everything is fine so far with the hard drive luckily.

Last night however I witnessed something I had never seen or heard of before. After reading this forum I see it is a very common thing for HP laptops. I got the corrupted display at first (bunch of different color all over the place etc. Upon reboot I noticed that even the bios screen etc had this corruption which I found odd at the time. I could barely read anything on the bios screen due to the corruption. When windows loaded up I got the 6 images like everyone here has witnessed. I thought perhaps I had caught a nasty virus somehow that perhaps corrupted the bios too (never witnessed that before but you never know). I went to HP's website with the intent of flashing the bios but soon discovered that the directions said to run the file in windows which was a problem because I could not actually read anything in windows (I was using a different computer to go to their site). I turned the machine back on (after about an hour) and everything looked fine all of a sudden. Thats when I realized it was all heat related and started doing some reading on the net.

Today I took the laptop apart and discovered the same poor setup that you all have found inside. I cant believe they actually paid someone to design this thing. I am laid off, they should hire me to to engineer for them hehe. I was expecting to see alot of dirt/dust inside the case, but I amazingly did not (more on that in a bit). I also noticed the thick heat pads that were used and the thick thick layer of thermal compound on the processor. I wish I would have taken pictures of this so I could show everyone the various design flaws. I stumbled upon this site after taking it apart. The fan is set up to intake air from underneath the laptop (which does not sit very high off the surface of whatever it is sitting on). This forces a person to use stilts to hold the laptop up if they want it to get any air at all basically. What is even more alarming is that the air exausts right out of the machine. There is no air flow created that would draw cool air across the whole board and components. instead the air is basically shoved right back out of the machine. This is also why the inside of the case looked so clean. There is no airflow drawing dust into the machine....

Upon closer inspection (and I do mean close), I finally noticed that the little housing the fan sits in had been clogged up a bit. I took the fan housing apart and cleaned it out. I also had read on the net about taking a heat gun to the nividia chips to re-seat them (they look like they are glued on with some orange glue stuff?). I used a hair dryer instead to heat the two nvidia chips up and when they were nice and hot and pushed on them a bit. I put the everything back together (no extra screws woot). The machine has now been running for quite a few hours with no problems. I have reinstalled vista on it, patched to service pack 2, so far so good.

These laptops definatley have a design flaw in their cooling. The assembly and fit of the heat bar (maybe its a tube, I didnt look) is also very poor. The 1/8th inch+ thich heat pads most likely dont help matters. HP needs to fix this. Here is what I expect out of HP.

1: They come clean and admit their mistake.

2: They offer some sort of compenstation as follows

a: Offer to fix the machines free of charge and fit them with a better cooling solution also
or
b: Replace the flawed machines with new machines that do not have these obvious design flaws

If HP does one of the above, I will regain my trust in them as a reputable company that truly stands behind its products. Afterall, that is what got them to where they are today. If they do not handle this correctly however, I look forward to seeing their demise. There are many companies who DO stand behind their products and DO care about what their customers think. Customers are the ones that got them their in the first place right?

Either way I hope some of this information helps you all. I am not sure if the hair dryer (on high) helped or not, but I have a feeling it did. It might be worth a shot if you have one of these laptops that is currently unusable. Hopefully HP will step up do the right thing here. We will see.

P.S. Taking this thing apart is not for the weak hearted user. It was probably the worst of any laptops I have dealt with to be honest. Very poor design overall to work on. I also take no responsibility for anything you try yourself. I just wanted to share how I got my wife's laptop back up maybe almost usable. Im sure I will have to invest in some more fans or something. This heat problem is definatly not fixed.
 
Of course I do have the same problem with my dv2700.

I have stripped it to the motherboard as well, and used a heat gun in order to reflow the GPU. However it doesn't help for a long time, and I have to do this quite often already.

The reason to that seems to be that when GPU heats up to some 80 degrees and it is moving slightly. Therefore, logically there are 2 solutions: not allowing the GPU to heat up and/or forcing it to stay where it is supposed to be and not allow any kind of movement.

The fact that I was amazed of is that the GPU actually has no cooling system at all. Well, except for the thermal pad which goes bad after a year or so. I suppose HP thought that the GPU would cool down by using a thermal pad connected to the top cover, which is supposed to dissipate the heat. Quite stupid I would say.

Currently I am trying how to figure out how to fix it. What I've got by now (only theoretical, and still to be tested):

Before following the steps below, it is wise to firstly clean the heat sink from dust of the CPU and replace the thermal pad with a good thermal paste (like Arctic 5).

1. Strip it to the motheboard.
2. Reflow the GPU solder by slowly heating it up with a heat gun and putting some small weight on it, like a coin.
3. Apply a good thermal paste (like Arctic 5) on the GPU and on a 2mm (or maybe a bit thicker) copper sheet and put the copper sheet on the GPU.
4. Try to fix tightly the top cover to the mainboard, so that there would be contact between it and the copper sheet from the top of the GPU.

As I said above, I have NOT tried this yet, but I will try it in the next couple of days. So I will get back to this soon.

If anybody has any feedback regarding the theoretical method described - please, you're welcome!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom