6/4/2010

HP's recall for some of these models was a secret and if you did not get your computer fixed for free by now you just may be out of luck!

HP Limited Warranty Service Enhancement

Lately a lot of HP's laptops have been coming into the shop with the overheating GPU and the infamous Black Screen of Death however quite different than Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death and a lot harder to fix. Strange as it might seem I found on the Internet a very strange way of temporarily solving this problem that worked quite well without opening the laptop. It required that you remove the battery and hard disk then turn the laptop on and set it on a blanket or towel with the laptop opened as if you were using it then leave it on for about an hour with the blanket/towel covering the fan and cooling vents so that you force the laptop to overheat. This causes the solder on the GPU to melt and re-flow  recreating the missing connections that gave you the black screen of death in the first place from overheating... (odd isn't it!) Now the reason this is a temporary solution is that when (not if) the laptop overheats agin the problem will resurface or even get worse because this time the excessive heat may damage other components on the system board rendering the system board useless and your laptop turns into a brick. Replacing the system board with get you back in business but the nVidia chip WILL overheat an you will have the same problem as before unless you take precautionary action by placing enlarged and more efficient heat conductors on the GPU to help keep it cool. I tested the heat emitting capabilities of the laptop before preforming the repair so that I would have a  legitimate before and after comparison. afterward. The range of heat emanating from the laptop GPU was 75c to 106c (167F to 224F). I let it idle and the temp was in the low spectrum (75c to 94c) then I started up Halo and the temp went to 106c (224F). This test was performed while the laptop was on a Belkin cooling pad! Now if you remember your schooling, water boils at 212F (100c) and the temperature inside your laptop is above that! Can you imagine the damage that is going to cause? Understanding what happened to your computer is the key to fixing it. Solder generally has a melting temperature of about 183c (361F), now for your GPU to reengage itself to the system board it has to get this hot to melt the solder under it to fix the problem. That is the fix to the problem., either that or a complete re-balling of the GPU. The initial problem with the GPU is solder fatigue cycling. Solder fatigue originates from getting very hot  and cooling down many times. Generally Solder fatigue escalates in failure the higher the temperatures, so the hotter your laptop gets the quicker it will fail due to the heating and cooling cycles. The solder cannot take the stress of this and then fractures causing lack of connection between the GPU and the system board and Wah Lah! you have the black screen of death or other such maladies. All temperature readings were performed with two free programs SpeedFan and HWMonitor.

I have had the "enjoyable" pleasure of fixing some HP Pavilion DV2000 laptops for customers. I purchased some copper shims on eBay. It cost me $13.00 for six shims that were designed especially for this task (they really work). I disassembled the working laptop to install the shims but first removing the pitiful excuse for heat conduction that HP has on these chips. When I disassembled  the heat sink mechanism; what I found was laughable. The GPU has a very thick thermal blanket on it and very little thermal compound. Now I don't know how you think but a blanket to me is something to help keep me warm (less of course I am in direct sunlight) so how is that help? Even the CPU had very little thermal compound on it, also the thermal compound was attached to a thin see through polyene layer of tape. Thermal tape is not very efficient in its heat transfer properties but in an assembly production environment it is very quick and easy to apply with no real knowledge of how to apply it. I seriously doubt that the decision to use thermal tape was the idea of an engineer... Hey, let's put inadequate heat conduction on a chip that has a tendency to overheat and then let's put in in a case with inadequate air flow... I believe this was a management decision to speed production and cut cost relying on some sales person's overstatement of the thermal tape and thermal blanket.

OK, so I cleaned and replaced the thermal junk that HP installed and used some Artic Silver thermal compound and copper shims (two for AMD Processors, three for Intel) that I had purchased on eBay. Electrical tape was placed on and around the GPU leaving only the top of the GPU exposed to help protect it from getting shorted out with the addition of new metal to the assembly. Thermal compound was placed between the two copper shims, on the GPU, CPU and on the top copper shim, then all the components were married to the heat sink assembly. The hardest part was disassembling and reassembling the laptop. So if you have one of these 'HP Easy Bake Ovens' and it has the black screen of death or if you are fortunate to only loose your wireless this is what you should do to fix the heat problem that will eventually damage the system board. If you cannot accomplish this task; find a qualified person that can. It is worth the price of your laptop to fix it for about $125.00. Or you can simply just spend another $899 or more to purchase another laptop with similar functionality (minus the overheating). Even if your laptop falls into HP's Extended Warranty, they will just replace the system board with the exact same system board that will eventually have the same problem; but then it will be out of warranty by then, well that seems to be the HP plan anyway...  So even if you get HP to 'FIX' the laptop, you should spend the $125.00 to get the heat sink enhancement done to help protect your re-investment (HP will not fix it properly). The cost of the parts are not the major issue, it's the cost of the labor to take the laptop completely apart to get to the heat sink assembly then put it back together. The cost of the parts for me to fix the laptop was about $25.00, (about $10.00 if you are fixing more than one). Shame on you HP! you have to disassemble the laptop to put another bad board in it anyway, why not do it right and stand by your products!

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nVidia Defects Was Spread to Other Computer Manufacturers

The nVidia defect problem is not limited to HP, other manufacturers that include Apple and Dell have been hit by the nVidia GPU overheating and failure problems. This problem has been known by nVidia as well as the compuer manufacturers since 2007, yet they have willingly sold the computers that have these chips in them to consumers with no warning or plan to fix them after they were sold. It seems to be all about the "bean counters", it would cost more to fix them than to tell lies and release a BIOS that turns the computers fans on all the time so that the computers can last until the warranty expires then not fix them due to planned politics. Even though nVidia has set aside 150-200 million dollars for repairs; the computer manufacturers still are not making all the repairs (Ref: http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1215037160521.html). The computer manufacturers are instead of standing by their products they are playing "legal chicken"; which simply means that if they can lie and not acknowledge the problem long enough that it will simply go away and the consumer will forget or think they caused the problem thereby dodging the class action suit if no one organizes against this wrong. If this problem only happened to one manufacturer there would probably be a big recall just like the car industry for the customers would have a bad taste in their mouths and would never purchase their products and then would become a customer of another computer manufacturer. But since this problem is so large and encompasses all the major computer manufacturers, the customers from one will just become the customers of another and there will be no real loss of consumers. What they are doing is to not repair your computer until it breaks. Instead of taking a preemptive strike and taking the precautions to make sure your GPU does not fail they will wait until it does. Now what would happen in the auto industry if they took that approach? Hey, the brakes on a few models are failing but we will not repair the problem until your brakes actually fail... Can you smell the money burning? Now HP had a "Limited" recall but failled to notify it's customers who owned the affected products. So tell me what is the point of registering your computer? They have your contact information, did they forget? I DON'T THINK SO!!!

Utilities that can help keep your computer cool:

SpeedFan

HWMonitor

Ref:

MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues

Summarizing the Nvidia problems with laptop chips overheating

All nVidia G84 and G86s are Bad

Nvidia G92s and G94 reportedly failing

Nvidia GPU failures caused by material problem, sources claim