Well crap.

[mk]

I'd say that you're stuck now and to get forward you propably need to remove the motherboard.

After that the route is something like fan, heatpipe, mechanical connections, electrical connections.

I have one of those original dv6 machines, it has a design fault, hot air goes back in.
Should be remodelled away now.

Generally I think we are doomed as long as BGA and lead free soldering is combined.
(they say that Xbox360 mobo is bent from the factory)

Other thing is tin whisker, a conductive hair like thing growing from solder.
If that's your case then heating them off is the only solution.
(hot air gun, oven, infra red etc.)

[overpowered]

In safe mode, I disabled the Radeon video driver in the device manager so that it would use the Intel graphics on the motherboard. After I restarted, this time it gave me a login prompt, which it wasn't doing before. However, once I logged in, it was back to black screen. I hear sounds from things starting up (skype, etc). Can't see a damned thing.

I also tried enabling "base video" in msconfig-boot. Resolution on the login screen went down but it still went black after login.

I'm trying to work up the courage to try to figure out how to remove the Radeon card.

[overpowered]

I looked through the manual for how to take the thing apart and replace stuff and I decided it's too far beyond my comfort zone.

I'm looking through laptop repair places on Yelp. I've found some reviews where people had similar problems and the fixes involved soldering. Time to give up and go to a specialist.

[mk]

Seems to be something else.

What happens if you leave it to that login state, can you get the screen back on after dimming?

Since you hear stuff the machine in not stuck, only screen is off, or something like that.

[overpowered]

Yeah, it's just the video that seems to be the problem, and only when it tries to do something more than safe mode video does.

[overpowered]

Send it back to HP?

My extended warranty (to 4 years) ran out in January.

I took it to a local place that specializes in laptops that got mostly 5 star reviews on Yelp. We have an HP service center in San Diego. Yelp users have extreme hatred for it.

[mk]

How's the future?

[overpowered]

So the first place pretty much scammed me and didn't fix the thing. They just rigged the drivers to use the intel graphics. When I tried to reinstall the OS I was completely fucked again.

I took it to a different place. They are slow (they've had it since Wednesday morning) but I got off the phone with them about an hour ago and they did a BGA reflow on the GPU and the graphics are working again.

Unfortunately, the first place also fuxxored the sound and the second place is still trying to figure out how to solve that.

[Kchrpm]

[thesameguy]

Laptop repair places are a joke. Paying someone $60 to $120/hr plus parts to fix a machine that's worth $200-$300 just never works out. Far better off just buying a secondhand machine off ebay and make one from two. Unless it's a brand new machine or has an obvious, easy repair (like an HDD or TFT), just get another one.

(This, says the guy that put $1000 in tires onto a $1700 Fiero )