Broken dv9700, display issues and Windows boot failure - replace the motherboard?

A friend of mine has a Pavilion dv9700 that's been broken for a while now. Apparently it was his sister for almost two years, working fine, before it broke. The image on the display is doubled up vertically and squeezed horizontally away from the right edge of the screen, and it also fails to load Windows. POST seems to go fine, can enter BIOS with no issues, but after it gets to the Windows load screen the image turns black (aside from the horizontal white line through the middle of the screen) and it either freezes there or sometimes gives a BSOD about a critical failure in loading Windows followed by a disk checking process as I recall, and then freezes. My mate says that sometimes if he leaves it alone for about a week or so it will act normally, regular image and load Windows, and then screw up again after a little while using it.



With all the mess surrounding the nVidia 8000M series and Dell, Apple and HP laptops we figured that this was the issue, and that since the GPU is soldered onto the motherboard he'd need to swap it out entirely. Someone at Staples or PC World, not sure where he took it exactly, also suggested that it would take replacing the motherboard.

But here's the rub, the service provider wants £200 for the job, and we figured we might get off a lot cheaper than that if we did it ourselves. So we took the whole thing apart and took out the motherboard to find the part number (only to realise that the bloody sticker was the one visible in the RAM bay from the start, but hey), and found a listing in the US for $130, but before going ahead and dropping the money for it I thought it might be a good idea to see if anyone here could confirm that this is the right way to go, swapping the motherboard. Is that correct, does anyone know?

While on the topic, does anyone also know whether there's a shop in the UK to offer HP motherboards for less than that? Part number is 459566-001. All in all, with shipping and taxes it'd probably come up to over £100, so was curious if there were any other recommended avenues for getting the part. I suggested eBay, and he said he found them for about £80 but that they were refurbished and he didn't know whether they were trustworthy or not.

 

Assuming the NVidia chip is your problem, replacing the motherboard will fix it. I have done this with a couple of HP 9xxx laptops.
Keep in mind, the motherboard you buy has the same NVidia chip, so may not last more then a year or two. There are threads here concerning adding heat disipation material for the video chip. Since your replacing the motherboard anyway, you may want to concider doing that. Also, there are threads concerning cooking the mother board to re-flow the solder for the video chip. This might be an idea for the old motherboard.

I would not go with refurbished. The video chip is the most common problem, if they "refurbished" it, they may have just done a re-flow, which is iffy at best.

 

Yup, either bake it (i've listed the procedure several times just look for it) or buy a NEW board. Apply liquid flux under the chipset if you can if you're baking it. And in both cases throw the crap thermal pads into the trash and do by hand or machine aluminum or copper shims to fill the gaps between CPU, GPU and heatsink. Attach shims to heatsink with Arctic Alumina or similar thermal adhesive/epoxy, use normal paste between shims and chips for obvious reasons.

 

Thanks for the advice, guys! I've passed it on and we'll see where we get. Will probably go with an altogether new motherboard and see about replacing the thermal pads.