Problems booting a Pavilion 17-e016dx

[weezerwookie]

Hi, All.

Trying to fix this Pavilion 17-e for a friend. The board powers on. Sometimes it powers on to a black screen. Sometimes it seems to start just fine with the HP logo splash, then it either goes black, or it shows a scramble of colors. One time I got into the bios menu, then the screen went black.

The results seem to differ when it powers up on DC power, and improve if you power on battery. He told me that for a while he was able to use it if he only used it on battery power, so maybe it's a problem with the power supply board.

Reseating ram does nothing. Changing out the SSD does nothing. Plug it into an external monitor gives no feed.

any other things I should try before I open it up?

Thanks in advance.

[WAWood]

@weezerwookie 

We're not allowed to tell you to open it up, as that voids any remaining warranty -- but I certainly understand where you're coming from in this regard.

I would doubt it was memory, as the problem is intermittent and I've not run into that much with memory issues.

The scramble of colors implies a video chip problem, but being intermittent, implies a cracked motherboard trace problem -- as ambient heating and cooling in the room can affect those issues.

You should see an image in an external monitor after booting into Windows, so if that is not happening, then go into Display Settings and confirm that Windows sees two displays.

IF it's a hardware issue with the system board, the laptop is essentially toast because HP does not sell those and any you find online will be used, and since the Windows license is tied to the system board, when you do the replacement, Windows will deactivate it and you will not be able to reactivate it.