Compaq V3000 dead.

I gave my brother my Compaq V3000 after buying another laptop. He was just playing Final Fantasy 7 on it when he said it froze during gameplay and the screen had a glitch effect on it.
He turned it off and turns it on but nothing happens, the screen is blank and nothing is happening now.

Any way to fix it?



EDIT: This thread shows the EXACT same problem my brother has.

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread76595.html

My guess is the laptop overheated?

 

HP has now issued a "recall" for the V3000 series due to motherboard failures. The "recall" also included some DV2000 but no mention of F-Series which shared most of the basic motherboard design. See below:
============================================

HP Limited Warranty Service Enhancement

HP has identified a hardware issue with certain HP Pavilion
dv6000, HP Pavilion dv9000 and Compaq Presario V6000 series
notebook PCs. You may be entitled to a free repair.

If you own one of these products, click on the link below for
additional details:

http://US-UrgentSupport.p08.com/u.d?0GffC4LpdUPrD4=0

 

Wow, they've expanded that page quite a bit. It used to just be dv6000 and dv9000's.

 

I know it is quite sad but it looks like HP is starting to step up. I hang around at the HP forum at HP site and there are literally hundreds if not thousands of reported failures in DV2000, DV3000, Dv6000 and DV9000 and F-Series.

I have a F-series and it has the same motherboard design so I wonder why HP is not recalling the F-series ...

 

What do you guys think caused this to happen? The symtoms are the exact same as the guy is with his DV2000 in the thread I linked to in my first post.

My brother's not too upset since he did get it for free (though he had it only for a month) but still, if it was his only computer, he would be in trouble. Lucky he has a desktop to go back to but it scares me it could just die like that without ANY warning at all! He was just playing FF7 and it just died.

Is there anything I can do? My dad is upset at having paid money to get a new keyboard for it to give my brother after I broke some keys and it just dies shortly afterwards.

Looks like the only choice is repair and even then, would it just die again later on?

 

My own theory is that it is overheating or poor heat management design. My own laptop was very hot to the touch before the BIOS update and much cooler after the BIOS update.

In mid Dec-07 HP released a critical BIOS update to most if not all of its AMD machine to make the fan runs constantly.

The components are literally being fried inside the chassis and the first to go is the wi-fi and then video.

 

My first dv2000 died out after 5months, the video card fried. It wasnt even running that hot because i kept a good eye on the temps and it was sitting on a laptop cooler alot.

It was fine the night i shut it down, the next morning i turned it on .. *BEEEEP BEEP BEEP* idiot alarm goes off...

 

^^^So what did you do? Hasta la vista dv2000? T_T

 

I'm 99% certain that the problem is that with the original BIOS version, the cooling fan would only run if the CPU temp hit 55C. This is bad because the fan also cools the rest of the notebook chassis. AMD CPUs don't run hot enough to trigger the fan often enough so the rest of the notebook cooks. Broadcom WiFi cards are apparently particularly susceptible to heat death so they're usually the first sign that something is wrong. NVIDIA chipsets run a bit hot too, though northbridge (integrated video) death seems to be a distant second to WiFi failure.

I'm hoping that HP's next generation of AMD notebooks uses the AMD Puma platform. The AMD chipsets (formerly ATI) are extremely power efficient. It would be nice if HP switched to Atheros wireless cards (better range, Linux friendly) from Broadcom or at least got rid of that INFURIATING BIOS WHITELIST but I'm not expecting it.

Intel notebooks have the same problem, but the Intel WiFi cards that Intel generally insists on bundling don't cook as quickly as Broadcom's so most of the problem reports have been on the AMD side. I'd expect that to change over time. I don't know if HP has made the same BIOS fix for Intel notebooks available yet but they really ought to.

 

I don't think we will repair this, my brother doesn't need a notebook right now and he could always get a new one later this year for school. He also didn't like the Turion processor and how hot it got.

What can I do with it now? I was thinking of taking out the 80gb HDD and putting it in my brother's desktop. What would I need to get it to work?

Was it a Turion model?