No, the 8400M didn't die, but pretty much everything else did.

My DV9000 is pretty much going on a limp leg now.

• First, after ~2 months of owning it i have accidentally fried its audio input. Well, it sucked anyway. It also took away one of the built-in mikes though.
• Then, two gray dots around 1mm diameter appeared the bottom of the screen. I guess it's bugs which crawled and died in there. I still haven't taken apart the display to this day. Last year i have succesfully cleaned the insides of a salvaged 19" desktop LCD which was full of dust at the bottom, but have never done a laptop screen before.
• Last summer, the wired network card died. Subsequently I have even replaced the IC on the motherboard to no avail.
• Somewhere around that time the optical drive got messed up too. It never worked properly, but since then it would take several tries to start burning a disc, and when it did get going it would do so really really slowly. Has problems reading scratched discs too.
• Then the numpad started going wonky. It would behave like on the models without a dedicated numpad - pressing Num Lock, apart from activating the numpad, would bring up a numpad in the middle of the keyboard. When the computer boots up with Numlock enabled, it works as normal. When it decides to not boot up with Numlock enabled, if i enable it that's what happens.
• Shortly afterward the nVidia driver started crashing. I reflowed the GPU at this point, this was around February this year. The GPU has been working fine since, and the numpad seemed to be restored as well.
• Now the numpad is acting up again.
• And to add a fresh fail to the list, since the past month the HDD started going bad. First 200 bad sectors at the end of the drive, now 2000. It won't take long till it craps out entirely. It's a Hitachi drive btw.

And you know what's funny? The blasted 8400M GPU still runs like nobody's business. :laugh: So it's new motherboard (well, that also means new 8400M), new HDD, and new DVD drive. And a screen cleaning. Some would argue that it's "new laptop", but heck... i like it.

 

Could be dead or stuck pixels?

Sounds like a problem with DV9000, they overheat and melt the wireless.
Put it in the oven. ;D

Yup, they overheat.

Finding a new motherboard is potentially easy since a lot of dv9000s fail, just check craigslist for broken ones.
I'd go with an SSD and a HDD in the optical drive bay, but that's just me. ;D

 

No. Definitely big specks of dust, or dead bugs. This coming from someone who has disassembled a screen before, read the whole thing.

Wireless is fine. Wired is dead.

Never had this problem with mine. Could be that i set it to automatically undervolt and underclock both CPU and GPU (obviously, no voltage adjustments for GPU) when it is idle. I have also undervolted the CPU to the minimum required for each p-state. That, since i first got it.

We don't have craigslist here but we do have equivalents. However i know a guy at a laptop repair center, and he can get me a brand shiny new board. That's what i will do.

Now, that's an idea, but SSDs are still pricey and i don't do anything that would require one. I don't game all that often anymore, but i do a lot of music production. And that just needs CPU and RAM. When it comes to the HDD it's size rather than speed, to store all those samples and plugins and recordings (done with high quality external soundcard obviously).

 

Add the VGA output to the list of failures. The horizontal sync signal has gone missing, as reported by two different monitors (and a third one that just says "no signal").