Laptop Hijinx

It's been nearly a week since my Dad fixed my laptop for me. I like my laptop a lot - it's a nice-looking black shiny DV6000 series machine from Hewlett-Packard - but this line does seem to be a little prone to problems. It's been back to HP for repair twice since I bought it, both times for a fault with the built-in wireless. The second repair was free even though the laptop was out of warranty by then, so kudos to HP for that, but this latest problem is the third hardware issue in less than 2 and a half years. Hmm.

This time the built-in speakers suddenly stopped working after a short train journey (not so great on a machine marketed as a "media centre laptop"). After digging around on the web it seemed that this has also been encountered by many other DV6000 owners, including someone who posted an interesting little video on YouTube:

which is pretty much what I saw (except that my power light still worked).

It turns out that there's an issue with the ribbon cable connecting the speaker assembly and the power button. In my case, when my Dad opened up the machine we could see the ribbon was almost "folded" at one point, and as a result the connections were damaged causing power to be lost to the speakers. I guess if we'd left it then eventually the power button would have failed too and it would no longer have been possible to turn the laptop on. There's more info about the problem and the fix on one of the HP forums.

Luckily for me however, my Dad's a bit of a whizz with this kind of stuff. Once I'd given him permission to open it up (all the while I was having kittens watching him prise the keyboard and speaker assembly apart) he was able to cut off the damaged part of the ribbon, expose some new contacts and reconnect the cable. Hey presto, speakers (and power button) working, good as new! Thanks Dad.

In the longer term I guess the ribbon cable needs to be replaced. I found someone selling some for £7.99 each on eBay, which seems pretty cheap compared to getting a new laptop so that's good. It was also interesting to take a look inside the laptop and see how it fits together. And I think that my Dad was pleased to have been able to fix the problem, and I'm sure that he'll be very happy to know that it's still working - almost as happy as I am!