lol
Why my laptop bricked that is...
See, HP had a series of laptops using NVidia chipsets and video cards. But there was a minor design flaw. Or two.. HP did not provide sufficient cooling for the innards of the laptop and NVidia made a series of faulty chips - both video and chipset - that just happened to melt.
If you were into playing video intensive games on one of these laptops, it quickly became a doorstop, sometimes but not all the time while it was still under warranty. If you did not make a habit of abusing the heat dissipation characteristics of the device and its internals, the unit might survive for a while. Like years. Long enough for you to rebrain the device into a Win7 machine and bury its original pileofcrap op-sys, otherwise known as Vista in a zombie escape-resistant crypt. Of course, by that time warranty would have been expired for time measured in years..
But the fine print engraved (using the same microprint device that the Fed uses to print all those new dollars) on the laptop motherboard says that on the night that a Peruvian shoe is eaten by its owner, all the magic glue holding its innards together will let loose and you will suddenly own a widescreen... brick..
Video is still ok, bios does not see a hard drive. I can boot into Linux from a DVD and have complete video, but Linux didn't see a hard drive either. Hard drive is recognized in my other laptop (I just didn't let it try to boot so Windoze wouldn't load the drivers for the other unit and mess things up) so the hard drive is ok. On-line forums suggested resetting BIOS to defaults (didn't work), removing the DVD (didn't work), letting it sit for awhile and maybe it will come back to life (didn't work), and replacing the mobo...
HP wants more for a replacement mobo than I paid for the laptop (off EBay) initially. Found a lot of used mobo's on EBay - many of which will still have the same possible flaw, found quite a few places that say they will repair the mobo - and install better heat removing features - if I send it to them, and - found one place that says they have the bottom part of the laptop (minus lid with screen, keyboard, battery, and drives.) In other words, the shell with the mobo, cpu, and heatsink inside. AND, they say that the heat-removing modifications have been made and this mobo is tested - and the guy does have 100% positive feediebacks.
Since it is a lot less work to swap keyboard, lid/video display, and toss my battery, DVD and hard drive into a different shell than it is to dismantle the thing and ship just the mobo off to Keokuk (and hope that in the time interval the White-Furbeast-with-no-tail-to-tell doesn't 'help' by rearranging all the dismantled parts) I'm leaning on pursuing that angle.
Price wise, it's a wash between repair + shipping, and buying this bottom half of a laptop (with free shipping..) Gonna sleep on that decision..
Then I should be good until the next time a Peruvian shoe gets eaten by its owner...
Or I break down and get a new(er) laptop without WinATE on it... ;-)