Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

[Dreamer]

Hi everybody.

I am having some weird problems with my friend's hp/compaq nc8230. To cut a very long story short, the laptop won't boot 9 out of 10 times. It does not even reach post- just blank screen, but power led is on and fan spins.

now, a firm twisting of the laptop will increase the boot sucesses to about 6-7 out of 10. Once booted laptop works normally.

my friend has had the laptop for about 1 year w/o problems. MB has been replaced by vendor. Problems started about 1 month ago with original MB and the new MB has worked for 3 weeks before doing exactly the same symptoms.

i have tried the following:

with battery, with adapter, battery only, adapter only, swap memory modules, only one module, no modules. all cards removed: modem, wireless, btooth, cdrom drive, hdd, lcd ( use external vga output) .

i have tried all the parts in another laptop and everything works. i have replaced memory, processor, wireless , bluetooth ,modem and adapter with known good parts and it does not solve the problem.

there is no external visible signs of damage on the motherboard at all.

I have even tried the MB out of the laptop case, no luck!!

Can anybody help me or point me in the right direction?

thanks in advance,

D

[Dreamer]

Re: Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

Hey guys, anybody thinks this could be due to bad caps on MB?

Please help me out

[Topcat]

Re: Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

Sounds like a cold solder joint or a bad connector somewhere. The 'twisting' part was a dead ringer for that.

[gonzo0815]

Re: Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

may be a bad solder joint or kontackt in the bios flash chip area. This is probably the only part, wich is only for boot up necesarry.

[arneson]

Re: Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

The fact that this happened to two boards makes me think it could be a design problem.
I did a search on one laptop and discovered that the model was prone to the same problem and hundreds of others, twist and shutdown.

I not only found the problem but the fix as well.
It was a Dell. A cover piece was making contact with a chip.

[Dreamer]

Re: Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

Thanks for your input guys, i will look for cold solder joints around BIOS chip and try to remedy these to the best of my ability. Will keep you guys posted.

Do you think I can rule out bad caps? ( since the laptop works fine if i managed to get it started )

regards to all,

D

[VILE DISRUPTION]

Re: Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

well i dont think bad caps would be the problem. Arneson has a point. get the covers off and try some attempts at raising the bottom down from the motherboard. maybe some aluminum can help with that. if the motherboard is mounted on the case, trim down some normal motherboard risers to size and then the trick is getting the same size.

[kuzeydogun]

Re: Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

hi badcaps people

this is an old post but i exactly have the same problem with the same notebook. I tried to send private message and emailed to the topic starter(dreamer), but could not get in contact with, so i am writing here...

Does any of you know what this guy did with his nc8230...
I cannot come with any solutions to this wierd problem and have no idea what to do with it...tried everything

[crocodile2009]

Re: Hello to all, first post and nc8230 hell

Got a laptop with exact same problem however I have the solution on how to fix it!

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...77&lc=en&cc=us

HP/Compaq have made a ton of dodgy laptops(yes designed poorly!) all with 3rd party graphic chipsets, so if your laptop has a Nvidia or ATi graphics chipset you will be prone to the same problem.

The problem is not with the graphic chipsets themselves, but the cooling. HP has these chipsets connected to the heatsink, but inbetween the chipsets and heatsink they always put a "heat transfer pad" which depending on the model is from 1mm to 5mm thick, and quite frankly they are cr4p at transferring heat.

So after a while your HP/Compaq Laptop graphics chipset gets very very hot, very quickly, unable to dissapate the heat due to the flawed heating pad design.

With all these new graphics chipsets they do not use pins, but rather hundreds of solder contacts on the base of the chipset that simply "sticks" to the motherboard via solder points. As the chipset heats up, the lead solder underneith begins to oxidize/melt and contact is lost between the motherboard. This is the same issue that Xbox 360's have with their red ring of death problem.

The solution? You need to pull the offending laptop apart, remove the motherboard and use a special hot air soldering gun(don't use a normal heat gun you can't control the heat) and reheat the graphics chipset for 3 minutes at the 300C tip setting. My friend who does this for me has fixed 2 out of 2 "turns on, black screen" HP Laptops so far and it's fixed both first go.

Seems HP has some explaining to do on this issue.