Failure to Repair

This post is about a something I was not able to fix. A friend had a laptop (HP pavilion ze4900) with no screen image, so he brought it over. It turns out that it had only a dark gray image without a hint of video signal and the video-out VGA port had the same problem. A bad sign. I switched memory chips since it was an easy thing to do and no luck. Another bad sign.

Next step, take it apart. I found something suspicious, a dark spot on the shielded cable to the LCD monitor. It is in the left side near the hinge points.

Here is a close up.


Conclusion: The short fried important components in the video circuitry. A little web research found that the video circuitry is integral with the main board and that a replacement board costs about $300.

So, we pulled the files off the hard drive and put them on a memory stick. He was glad to have his files back.

Rick