dv9000 Lost of Display Issue

[sam98177]

The other day, the screen went blank; but I noticed it was extremely dim.  I hooked the laptop to an external monitor and was able to see the desktop.

When I realized that I could not fix the issue, I called Costco's Conceirge service (I bought the laptop thru Costco), who told me it was out-of-warranty (by almost a year).  They connected me to HP and after some brief "troubleshooting" (for the lack of a better word), he told me it would cost $325 to fix.  He said the LCD went bad.  I told him, "Leave my case issue open and I'll think about it."

I did some research on my own, to see if I could fix it myself much cheaper.  Guess what I found out?  I AM NOT ALONE WITH THIS PROBLEM!  Well my particular model is a dv9033cl, which is not one of the models that HP would fix for free.

see the following:  http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&cc=us&docname=c01087277&dlc=en

I noticed that all the comments are about an overheating flaw with the nVidia Go 7600 graphics card and the PC's fan not working right; and a BIOS update may fix the problem.  My current BIOS was the original F.02, the latest on the driver's sight is F.29; so I downloaded it and did the update:

GUESS WHAT?  The BIOS update resolved the issue and the display came back to life.

F^*&^%@#$ HP tried to rip me off $325 and the incovenience of sending them my computer for something that took me a few moments of my time to fix.

I called back the Costco Conceirge service, who connected me to HP, to express my concerns.  The HP rep told me they would have not charged me any money if they would have only fixed it with the BIOS update (ask me if I really believe that).  He apologized that the techs didn't have me try that in the first place.  HMMMF

I'm writing this to let everyone know what to do if they are having the same problem.  Hopefully the victim will do a search and run across my post before they let HP rob them of hard earn money.

Sam

[exHPcustomer]

I hope that your unit keeps working.  According to the web site the bios upgrade is not a fix ... but a preventivatve mesure .... that might keep you going till you are out of warranty . 

[knocksto]

i also have hp pavilion dv9700 and i'm finding difficulties in setting my screen resolution to the correct resolution. the possible resolutions are high (1024*768) or low (800*600) with no intermediate. please i need help to be able to set the correct resolution.