HP Pavilion G6 : Black Screen - The Towel Fix !

[bertie40]

Now this, admittedly, is straight out of "Drive-in-the-freezer" territory.

Ive been looking at a Pavilion G6 laptop, which boots up to a black screen with a flashing "Caps Lock" light.

I've messed around with a lot of things, and, cutting a small novella short, didn't get very far.

(yep, I pulled the drive and copied off the data, no probs.).

I was reading up about this error, and the general consensus was to wrap the machine up in a towel, and leave it running for an hour.

Deliberately overheat it.

Yeah right, good joke.

Except the successful replies ran for 8 pages. ........ So i tried it, and it worked !

Yes, the machine was very hot, but it did boot up !

I'll see how it goes in the morning when it is ambient again.
Is this a one off, or a full fix ?

Obviously, the trapped heat may have an effect on poor solder joints, or some such.

I just thought this may help in instances where the GPU is a bit flakey.

Hay Ho..

 

[mr m]

As you see it worked for a bit but it's a temporary, Band-Aid fix. Heat expands so if there is an intermittent connection it appears to work but once it cools (contracts) it opens again.

To fix it right you have to find the component or trace that is open and reflow the solder for a solid connection. It will never get hot enough to flow solder by wrapping it in a towel. You need about 400 F to melt the typical solder used in electronics.

 

[Markverhyden]

And that temp is conveniently above the melting point of most plastics

 

[smashedbotatos]

It works because it is similar to a temporary reflow. If it heats up enough the solder joints expand, and in some cases even reflow. Some of the solder used can reflow in the mid to high 200 degree range. While it is temporary, it could work a 6 months or a year or long. Then again maybe only an hour or a day.

Not the best way to fix it. A proper reflow will save you from cooking you hardware. Haha

 

[NYJimbo]

I just thought this may help in instances where the GPU is a bit flakey.

Hay Ho..

Shame on you Bertie. After reading how you came up with the money for D7II by dressing up like a woman and putting out on some filthy street corner in Yorkshire, I'm appalled that you would take the easy route on this lappy by doing the "Towel Fix". You go all out for little baubles yourself, but go skimp on your customers, the ones that put food in your mouth ? You do realize that machines is just going to come back to you in a few days, don't you ? Shame, shame I say.

 

[Krynn72]

Is this a one off, or a full fix ?

I think you should follow your own advice, and do what you say in your signature!

But really, its coming back in a week or two. Even our proper reflows come back quite a bit, especially with HPs.

 

[bertie40]

Well, the machine is quite old, I've known the owner since she was a toddler, who played along with my toddler, and she lives 5 houses away.

When I first received the machine, it really was in a bad way and it really is uneconomic to repair. So I recommended ditching it.

I'm certainly not advocating this as a fix. More for interest.

I've done quite a bit of labour on it, and replaced the keyboard, all for £40.

As for the high heels, I detect jealousy.

 

[kyriacos]

fix? cough cough

This is not a fix, not even a temporary fix, it's a temporary workaround. Source: own experience

Reflow is better but still carries a high possibility of re-occurrence.

Quality re-balling job is the permanent solution.

 

[KompuKare]

Quality re-balling job is the permanent solution.

Is it though? The Nvidia problem was by all accounts (Nvidia never came clean on what the actual fault was), the solder bumps or the underfil. Re-balling only treats the solder on the PCB not in the silicon packaging.

This is the closest image I was able to find

So the problem in this case is the bump of underfill in the actual chip package, not the BGA solder balls connecting the packaged chip to the PCB.

That's why for instance Apple (the only vendor who was really willing to try to fix people's bad Nvidia laptops) was only able to offer a temporary fix because they were only able to offer a new/refurbished motherboard with the same faulty 65nm Nvidia parts. Since pretty much all 65nm Nvidia parts had the same solder bump problem, any such fix was just temporary.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Quality re-balling job is the permanent solution.

Re-balling with a new GPU (2010 or later) would prove more reliable, if the current GPU was manufactured in 2009 or earlier, because of the underfill issue. There is even debate about whether it should be done with lead-free solder balls to ensure a reliable bond between the lead-free solder left on the MB and GPU pads and the leaded solder balls that are de rigueur in re-balling circles. (Most re-ballers attach with temps that peak around 205C whereas they would use 225C if using lead-free balls. At 205C max, the residual lead-free solder would not have liquified, leaving a poor bond with the leaded solder ball, it is thought. I suspect that by using leaded solder while cleaning up the old solder one creates an alloy of leaded and unleaded solder that has a lower melting point than 217C, the melting point of lead-free balls.)

 

[kyriacos]

KompuKare in the case of NVidia it does seem that there were wrong engineering design and manufacturing choices made.

A very meticulous Charlie Demerjian analyses this complex mess in a three part (!) article in the inquirer.

The problem is extremely complex and defies a simple explanation. It involves multiple poor choices, multiple engineering failures, and likely a few bad accounting choices.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1004378/why-nvidia-chips-defective
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1013947/why-nvidia-duff-chips-shoddy-engineering
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/01/nv-should

 

[Markverhyden]

KompuKare in the case of NVidia it does seem that there were wrong engineering design and manufacturing choices made.

A very meticulous Charlie Demerjian analyses this complex mess in a three part (!) article in the inquirer.



http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1004378/why-nvidia-chips-defective
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1013947/why-nvidia-duff-chips-shoddy-engineering
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/01/nv-should

Thanks for the links. We all know something had to have been going on. There were just too many OEM's having too many problems