HP Pavilion and the Black Screen of Death

[Oni Koneko Damien]

So about two years ago my girlfriend decided she needs a new laptop. Eventually she settled for switching from her old Toshiba to an HP Pavilion 4k (first mistake, we know), and for a while it works fine. Recently, though, we've been running into an odd issue:

Every time Windows does some sort of update on her machine and the computer automatically restarts, the screen stops working. The little power-lights turn on, and the computer makes all the right noises, but the screen remains off. Not just blank, but completely and utterly off.

We've tried a number of solutions, including several variations of starting it without the battery, taking off the back parts and cleaning the individual components, etc. Each time the screen starts working again, seemingly at random as none of the fixes we've tried work twice. Since this only happens after updates, and eventually starts up again on its own, we suspect this is more of a software than a hardware issue.

The computer's long past its warranty (never mind the fact that HP is notorious for making any attempt to get computer repairs covered as painful a process as possible), and we're poor college students, we're basically restricted to do-it-yourself remedies. Everything we've found online suggests that we basically take a heat gun to the graphics card, which is something neither of us feel comfortable doing yet.

Has anyone here had the same/similar problem? Does anyone know if it's specifically hardware or software related? Any easy fixes to this that don't require several hundred USD in repairs?

[Mr Bean]

Three things

1. The Screen is dieing, your boned
2. The Connection between the laptop motherboard and the monitor is going, your boned unless you have a DIY friend who can try resetting the pin connection.
3. This is software related, you might not be boned.

Screens going out can be caused by several things, a dieing video card, ram going bad (Don't laugh I've seen it on a HP before where the memory stick went bad and the screen died as a result) the screen itself dieing or the motherboard dieing.


Remember the screen is pretty far down the chain, and because it's a laptop, it's not easy to exactly take the screen off and connect it to another computer, at least if the connection between the screen/laptop is going bad.

[General Zod]

Sounds like a problem with the ribbons that connect the screen to the motherboard. I had similar issues with an old HP I used to own but I was able to send it in under warranty at the time. Did you try connecting it to an external monitor to test the screen?

[Vendetta]

There may be a problem with the graphics chip. I can't remember the affected models, but some HP/Compaqs with nVidia chips have a duff graphics chip and there is a warranty extension for the issue.

[Edi]

The most common reason for screen failure in that manner is either a burnt out backlight or a busted inverter (the component that regulates some of the electric current going to the screen). They cause a black screen and both are relatively cheap and easy to fix.

I would check those first and if they're fine, then the problem is more serious.

[White Haven]

My psychic powers tell me that that particular Pavilion is either a dv2xxx, dv6xxx, or dv9xxx model. The bad news is that it's almost certainly not the screen. The worse news is that I know that because those three series were ridiculously notorious for frying their own motherboards due to faulty cooling settings in the factory-shipped BIOS. That usually manifested as failures in the onboard wireless card first, followed by the precise symptom you described, although not usually in an intermittent state. Given that the system still works at least sometimes, a BIOS update MIGHT help, but I doubt it.

This is all, of course, contingent on me being right about the model of HP. Also: the problem was far more common on AMD-processor systems, what chip do you have in there?

[JointStrikeFighter]

Is the screen *extremely* faint? If so I *guarantee* the problem is intact the 'lid closed' sensor has become jammed on (especially if it's a dv2xxx).