HP DV7 Gold Edition Resto-Mod

[H0R53]

I've been using my 10 year old MPC Transport T2400 (link in sig) for a while. It's a really good, rugged laptop, and it was perfect. Except it was ugly. So I painted it, but it was still ugly. It was too square, too sharp, and a little too small. As an addendum it maxed out at 3GB of RAM, even with two 2GB sticks. The Intel T7200 in it was nice and fast, and the X1600 Pro graphics were great, but like I said, at 15.3 inches it was too small.

 

Enter the DV7 1127 CL, 17" AMD Turion based notebook.

 

This laptop was free! A friend of mine hunts on Craigslist and Facebook for "Lot of XXX for sale" and got a slew of laptops. Among them there were a few HPs. He said if I fixed the ones that were broken I could have the 1127 he got.

 

I fucking HATE Hewlett-Packard. 

 

From another thread I posted in:

Ohhohoho

 

Don't even get me started on HP

 

1. The Omen is garbage

2. The Spectre is garbage

3. Everything they've made is garbage

 

Honestly. I've owned 7 HP laptops from different years. Their quality is about as consistent as a teenage girl's mood.

 

A DV9500 from 2006 is better built than a DV7 from 2009, yet the DV7 1127CL from mid 2008 is better built and simpler to repair than either.

 

I had an HP desktop (compaq, really). It was new when I got it, and I went to add a second hard disk, the SATA power connector literally fell right off.

 

Everything I do and/or say on these forums is from personal experience.

 

And I say that HP is garbage.

 

Out of the 7 HP laptops I've owned, only 2 are even functional now, due to my own efforts to keep them that way. I had to bake the motherboard of one in a toaster oven at 450 degrees for ten minutes just to get it to work.

 

One even caught on fire. The other two just fell apart.

 

Anyone who's ever had to repair an HP laptop can say that they are extremely poorly designed from a logical point.

 

They use far too many screws, things are in weird places, and...Well, just look at this heat sink.

 

Something to mention is that a lot of HPs use AMD, while Dell is the other way, Dell uses primarily Intel.

 

HPs are extremely hard to repair because they are so poorly built/designed. I was lucky that the 1127 CL was one of their best designed laptops. It's far easier to disassemble and reassemble than the others, and doesn't require any fucking proprietary connectors for the drives.

 

Needless to say I was elated that this one was so well built. My DV9500 is still running but it's a very weak laptop with poor graphics capabilities.

 

I used my universal charger to find out if it worked. It did, sort of. It had some sort of problem where it would report a CPU error even though there was none. After several days of research I concluded that the motherboard was failing. Of course, I didn't want to buy another one.

 

So guess what I did.

 

I disassembled the entire thing, took the motherboard out, removed the heatsink, CPU, RAM, and CMOS battery, and I...

 

Put it in my toaster oven on 450 degrees for ten minutes.

 

After letting it cool down, I reassembled the entire laptop. Before it showed me the flashing caps lock and num lock LEDs, and sometimes it powered up, sometimes not.

 

Now, however, there were no errors during post.

 

Needless to say, this is the sixth laptop motherboard that's been fixed by reflowing the motherboard. And the fourth that's been an HP. The other ones was an older Dell that didn't actually need it and the last was a Toshiba.

 

I'm a sucker for customization. I had an iPhone 4S, and that's the only iPhone/CrApple product I've ever owned. I jailbroke it and installed Cydia and customized the living shit out of it before it got stolen.

 

Just wait till you see this HP.

 

 

Specs:

AMD Turion X2 RM-72

4GB RAM (soon 8)

32GB Hually SSD

1TB Western Digital Blue HDD

AMD HD3200 Graphics (OC from 600MHz to 750MHz)

HP Blu-Ray drive taken from another HP

Glossy 17.3" 1440x900 screen

Windows 7 Professional x64 SP1(Fully updated)

14.4V 73WH 8-cell battert (lasts about 4-5 hours)

 

Things I've changed that are not factory:

CPU (original is a little more power hungry)

RAM (Original 2x1GB)

DVD/BR drive (Original was just a plain CD/DVD drive)

Battery (Original is 60WH)

GPU clock speed (stock @600Mhz)

Windows (was Windows Vista, gonna install my Vista VS theme for Windows 7 soon)

Login Screen background changed

OEM info changed

Boot screen changed

[H0R53]

[Gung Pow Chicken]

I'm not much of an HP fan myself but there Elitebooks / Probooks (mainly Elitebooks) are amazing machines, I've been a long time Thinkpad fan (maybe 15 years or so) and I actually just moved to an Elitebook 8570w I prefer it over my T430/T530 or W540. I love the size and port selection, also they feel premium as fuk.

[H0R53]

1 minute ago, Icuw1pc said:

I'm not much of an HP fan myself but there Elitebooks / Probooks (mainly Elitebooks) are amazing machines, I've been a long time Thinkpad fan (maybe 15 years or so) and I actually just moved to an Elitebook 8570w I prefer it over my T430/T530 or W540. I love the size and port selection, also they feel premium as fuk.

Everything on this HP is gold and chrome with glossy enamel. It feels like you're a crime boss or something, it's smooth to the touch. One of the reasons why I disliked my MPC.