HP dv7 primary display/monitor flicker help needed

I have a HP dv7-6100 notebook, over the past few weeks I have been getting a random flicker on the display.
It flickers black with two vertical lines on the left side of the screen. It seems to be random, most happening when browsing the web in firefox. Was not able to reproduce it, it just comes and goes seeming randomly.

Two days ago I managed to borrow an external monitor to see if its a hardware issue with the laptop display, but to my surprise the flickering issue just moved to the external monitor connected over HDMI and the laptop display is not flickering but the primary external monitor is now flickering in the exact same way.

No idea what might be causing it.

I have uploaded a photo of the flicker, when it flickers the whole screen is black with just these two lines along the left edge. The exact same behaviour on both the laptop display when no external display is connected, and on only the external display with no flicker on the laptop one when external is connected.



Anyone have any idea what might be causing this and what can be tried to resolve it short of a full windows reinstall?

 

Don't think a re-install will do much good. With the display itself ruled out and such random artifacting on the screen the prime suspect is the dGPU. Especially if it happens more often with Firefox running; it can enable the dGPU for performance improvements on certain sites; Firefox's performance settings.

Another possibility is the iGPU (embedded in the cpu) and, lastly, the motherboard itself.

To narrow down the list:

1. Disable 'Use hardware acceleration' in Firefox.
2. Better; disable or use roll-back driver on the dGPU in Device Manager.
3. Best; set 'Switchable Graphics' to 'Fixed' in the bios and specify iGPU, if this settings is available.

Once you have only the iGPU active or only the dGPU then you are left with the following scenarios:

1. Issue only with iGPU active; swap cpu (cheap fix).
2. Issue only with dGPU active; reflow bga dGPU (with oven or heat gun) or buy new motherboard.
3. Issue with either graphic card active; new motherboard.

 

Thanks for the advice and suggestions on the fix. Last couple of weeks I ‘resolved’ it by borrowing an external monitor and having it plugged in and switched off the screen so that windows still had it listed as a connected monitor and that way the artifacting was confined to that primary monitor and I could use the laptop ok without the flickers.

I vaguely remembered that the issue probably started when I was typing on the laptop keyboard rather vigorously, so I was wondering whether something inside might have got loose as the keyboard is sitting right on top of everything and it’s separated by just a thin piece of metal plate from the motherboard.

I needed to clean the laptop and the fans anyway so I decided to just take it all apart and see if I notice anything that might be the issue, I’ve done this full disassembly at least 3 times in the past as the main fan had failed before and had to replace it which is made ridiculously complicated by the way HP built the thing so you pretty much have to take it all apart and remove the motherboard to get to the fan. But since I had this practiced wasn’t a big job.

I removed everything cleaned the dust out and decided to replace the fan again as the existing one was bugging me since I put it in about 8 months back because the speed modulation did not work on this particular Sunnon model and it was running full speed all the time, no idea why as it worked fine on the previous ADDA fan, and could never find any seller selling the original fan by Delta Electronics, which I think run the best out of all of them before it failed.

After I did all this and put the whole system back together to my surprise the display artifacting has stopped, for now at least, so maybe something indeed was loose on the motherboard which was causing it. Won’t know until it decides to show up again.

If anyone managed to read this far, you can see it has been a ‘joy’ dealing with this HP laptop since 2011, and I did not even mention the ram failing within warranty and the keyboard being replaced because all the letters rubbed off twice now, and HP refusing to release new video drivers since 2011, the latest one released about 6 months after I bought it and then nothing, no Win8 support less than a year after I bought it, etc.

To bring this story to a close, it’s the end of the road for this one, I have finally after a long while ordered a new system and this one will be retiring, if everything goes well the new system will be here in the next week or two, so I will be sharing my experience with that later as I decided to go a slightly different route from a big gaming laptop, as the Area-51m was in consideration for a while there.

Overall 8 years is not a bad run for a $1700 HP entertainment notebook, despite all the challenges along the way, and it can still run decent amount of games, excluding new AAA ones, to this day.