[ . . . ] How did you heat it up?
Here's some info on the whole "heat it up" thing.
Your motherboard contains lots of little solder points, and sometimes, after a length of time, little fractures can form in those solder points. Some people will say this happens when a manufacturer uses cheap solder, and I've heard it said that's the case with
hp® . . . regardless, any solder which is cracked is a source of potential performance instability, because it's like introducing an on/off switch set to "off" at that point in the circuit. The idea behind heating up the board, then, is to get it warm enough for the solder to start getting soft, to start flowing a little, so that any solder fractures disappear, and so that once the heat is removed and the board cools down again, every solder point becomes one contiguous unit again.
This can be done professionally, in which case it's called a "motherboard reflow" — you can try Googling it, and there's a Wikipedia article about it — it's a professional job, is done by hand, and you have to know what you're doing.
But what an amateur can do is try his or her luck by simply heating up the whole board as a unit to see if that will do the trick. There are 3 ways this can be done ; the two that involve stripping the laptop down to the bare motherboard and then heating it up involve using either ( i.) a heat gun, or ( ii.) an oven. You can look up both. The third way, which doesn't require taking the laptop apart, simply makes use of a towel, which I'll describe.
Turn the laptop over and locate the cooling vents . . . these are just parallel slots cut into the plastic chassis on the underside (and sometimes including the side) of the laptop. You want to block those vents using a thick towel, then turn the laptop on, and leave it like that for about 1 hour. During that hour, the heat generated inside the casing (which is considerable) will be unable to escape because you blocked the exit . . . this will cause the temperature inside to increase enough over an hour's time to cause the solder to soften up, hopefully enough to fix the problem.
A tip for the towel method ᎓ when the hour is up and the towel removed, the laptop should be turned on
immediately to see if it worked, i.e. without waiting for it to cool down. You want to do that because, if it does turn on and then, say, 20 minutes later it doesn't anymore ( not so unusual ), you will have at least determined with virtual certainty that the problem is indeed the solder points. Had you instead waited, then tried it to no avail, you wouldn't have any indication that what you did helped, even if only temporarily, and you still wouldn't know for sure whether the solder points are the problem.
If you find the towel method did help, but only temporarily, you then have the option of either getting it professionally done or trying to apply more heat — perhaps with the oven. In this case, look up the recommended temperature and "cooking time". There's lots of info online about all of this, including the thread below in this very forum ᎓
I have a broken HP laptop. The screen is blank, but the lights come on. It does not work with and external monitor. A guy said that I need a reflow. What is a reflow? Can I do it myself?
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