10 September 2009 - 16:20HP DV2000 Backlight Problems


DV2000 notebook by HP has some serious issues. I just recently picked this laptop up from a customer who wants me to fix it. And to be honest i’m shocked that HP even allow it to be sold at all. Don’t get me wrong, the laptop is half decent as long as it’s still working… But there are some serious design issues with it that make it seriously not worth spending your hard earned cash on. So anyway i take a look at it to figure out what’s wrong with it. Basically the problem that the customer was complaining of was that the screen is extremely dim when you boot up. The windows and graphics are faintly visible but they’re too dark to make the screen some what useable/viewable. I open it up, take a look inside, even did some research on the net. Turns out it could be one of three things… three? all of which are related to the screen in one way or another. This makes it even harder for me to diagnose as it’s not one of those ones where i can just try each one and hope it works as of the three our of two would require me to change out a part.. which costs money.

So the first thing i tried was the lid switch issue. Apparently the lid switch is prone to some kind of wear and tear, which after some time will completely die. The lid switch is the switch that turns of the screen when you close the laptop and when you open the laptop the screen should come back on. The solution for this is to disconnect the lid switch located roughly under the F8 key which you can see in this picture below circled in red:

dv2000 lid switch plug

Image credit

By unplugging the switch you disable the on/off mechanism for the backlight which is supposed to fix the dim screen issue. Unfortunately this didn’t fix it for me.

The next solution is to switch out the inverter board for a new one, which apparently is also prone to dying too. The inverter board is located under the screens protective plastic cover at the bottom in the middle. You can view it in the pictures below:

Inverter board:

hp dv2000 inverter board

Right so i bought a new inverter board off ebay, the part arrived and i switched out the board and guess what? it didn’t fix the problem… Right, so at this point i was pretty frustrated and was gonna just give the laptop back to the customer and tell him to take it elsewhere. I considered trying the last of the three fixes and that was to switch out the CCFL tube which is an absolute pain to do. But i came across a better idea which was suggested by a friend of mine who also repairs laptops/computers for a living. He suggested to just change the entire screen. Genius! heh.. So i’ve told the customer that we’re changing the entire screen which will work out alot better for him in the long run anyway as the previously mentioned problems that occur on these badly made laptops will most likely happen at some point anyway. So changing the screen should hopefully God willing avoid those other issues for another couple of years or so.

Final thoughts; if you’re going to buy a bargain notebook save some extra money up and buy something better than the DV2000. Infact just avoid HP alltogether and go for a Toshiba or IBM. Enough said.

*UPDATE* It turns out that the problem wasn’t the screen after all…!?!? IT WAS THE GRAPHICS CHIPSET ON THE MOTHERBOARD! ARRRGHH!

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