HP DV6000 Blank screen

Just had a HP DV6000 laptop in which the customer reported to me as having a problem with the screen. It had been restarting itself or the screen freezing in use but now it would not even start up.

It did not take me long to research this problem. I found many references and alot of youtube videos on the subject. The problem is a basic design flaw. You have heat from the processor going directly over the graphics processor chip, so you have your GPU running hotter than your processor and if it gets too hot, the solder holding the chip melts and the chip becomes unseated. The processor and GPU are upside down on the motherboard so effectively the GPU is dropping out of the board.

The fix is simply dismantling the laptop, and carefully, reheat the GPU so the solder makes contact with the motherboard again. I used the blowtorch attachment for my butane powered soldering iron to limit the area to be heated. Once cooled down replaced the paste on the processor and GPU cleaned out the fan and put it all back together. Key Presto it worked.

I use a program called speedfan to monitor the temperatures and another called hot cpu tester to get the temperature up and all was good.

Iam a bit concerned about my HP DV9500 as this has always been very hot but then I like to run it at maximum power!

What is a book?

Iam always getting stuff through the door or on the phone trying to sell me advertising for the business. Little do they know that I come from a publishing background and do have some understanding of advertising.

An interesting twist has come my way which I feel the need to comment on. Small Print Publishing Ltd sent me some blurb enticing me to advertise in a book called "Start your own business". The book is bone-fide and published yearly even with an ISBN number but as long as I bought advertising space I could become a "Recommended Supplier". I understand magazine advertising and in such cases its always a playoff between editorial content and advertising: the more editorial content, the higher cover price, so a book generally does not contain advertising and has a high cover price. Free newspapers and magazines are at the other end of the scale with mostly advertising and very little content. This has always made me wonder about computer magazines because most cost £5 or more yet are stuffed full of adverts and those so called free software disks often contain paid for software advertising and free utilities you can download for free yourself from the internet.

I digress, so my question is how successful is this book. In newspapers and magazines you can give circulation figures, which by law you can not lie about; exaggerate a bit, say you print 5000 copies but you can say you have a 15,000 readership as up to three people may read that paper / magazine. You dont have to prove your readership and who is to say that your copies get distributed, just as long as that number of copies gets printed. With a book I have yet to see anyone who comes clean about how many they sell, they just use marketing blurb such as best-selling.

I went to the website www.smallprintpublishing.com and was disappointed as all it has was "website coming soon" but a nice piece of flash describing what they did and indeed they do small print runs of books. I have written software manuals for products and its so much easier to publish yourself, though most software manuals can be downloaded along with the programs these days.

I still come back to the advertising though. I know you get revised editions of books but have never seen one revised due to advertising. Just what is the content to advertising ratio? Does the book size depend on how much advertising they get? I was thinking about e-mailing them but wasnt that bothered. What I did find interesting was that I had received a direct mail marketing letter. If they had sent me a copy of the book I might have thought more about their offer. Oh there is also a print deadline at the end of the month just to get you to feel you will be misiing out on something - no surpise there.

Suspicious Phone Call

I had an interesting phone call the other day. A man with an indian accent, clearly from a call centre, phoned me to say there was something wrong with my computer. He said he was from Microsoft and through his help I could check the problem on my computer. Since when does Microsoft call its customers? I thought, so I was immediately suspicious, however I thought I would play along. He got me to start up the event viewer and look for warnings and errors. No matter how good your computer behaves there will always be warnings and errors in the log but usually they are not serious. He asked me how may errors I had and I lied saying there were two warnings and three errors. He kept asking me to read the errors out and look for more errors and frankly I got bored and put the phone down.

I thought no more of it until a few days later when one of my customers phoned me and was concerned about a similar phone call she had had, but it had gone further with her and they had actually remotely connected to her machine. First they got her to go to ammyy.com which provides a free program for remote desktop work, similar to teamviewer where your computer creates a client code that you give to someoneelse who then becomes and operator and takes over your desktop. A great little program but you sure as hell dont know who is connecting to your machine. Next they got her to go to a website aka-cdn-ns.adtech.de. My customer was a bit vague here but I think they might have got her to install some software, so my first thought was spyware/keylogger. She had not used her banking, social network or ebay so I was confident that her data was going to be safe but I got her to immediately check for spyware and viruses. She was only suspicious after continually asking if the person phoning her was trying to sell her something and them just fobbing her off.

If you get a similar call just put the phone down.