Buying a Refurbished Laptop Motherboard?

[badfish2]

Anybody have a good or bad experience with buying a refurb motherboard locally or off ebay? I have an out of warranty laptop that has a pretty common defect with the onboard video. I guess refurbs are reflowed or the reballed, im not too familiar on what to expect from this.

[badfish2]

Its an HP dv9000 if anyone wanted to know

[Corbin Dallas]

I've purchased many refurb'd boards off ebay.

The DV9 was and is well known for the video card BGA connection that has gone bad. My suggestion is to ask the seller how they refurbished the board. Some sellers on ebay merely heat the chipset with a hot air gun, while others use a real BGA rework station.

[badfish2]

Yeah that's what I've heard, I've even seen some videos on youtube of the "oven method"

Looks like some of these sellers that have 3000+ sales on just laptop parts probably know what they're doing.

[Corbin Dallas]

Yeah that's what I've heard, I've even seen some videos on youtube of the "oven method"

Looks like some of these sellers that have 3000+ sales on just laptop parts probably know what they're doing.

Although the seller may have 3000+ sales, you might want to find out if those include refurbished motherboards or if that's all parts.

[high_revs]

Although the seller may have 3000+ sales, you might want to find out if those include refurbished motherboards or if that's all parts.

yeah.. this... i always look for the kind of items sold recently. sometimes, scammers would have like up to or near 100 positive feedback and they're all like a buck or a buck fifty garbage. suddenly, they're selling something like in the thousands of dollars. screw that... unproven seller still to me.

[badfish2]

I ended up purchasing from a seller that deals in pretty much only motherboards. The new board should be arriving today and getting installed shortly after..I might have overlooked an issue though..the original board came with 256mb onboard video memory, the one I purchased was listed (and verbally confirmed) as a fully compatible board with 512mb, from a newer model (HP DV9700).

Am I about to find out the hard way that my OEM installation disk will no longer work? The original HD with the recovery partition is toast, but I used the recovery disk creator utility before it went out.