HP Pavillion DV5 Notebook
AMD 2ghz; 3 GB ram
32 bit OS running vista home permium

Problem=upon cold start the screen is black but I can hear the system running and hear the wav files such as the start up screen. Screen stays black no matter what I do.

I disconnected the power and battery and removed both RAM sticks. Waited a few minutes because they seemed a little hot. Put them back in and the PC worked fine for about 2 days. Then it happened again.

Performed same trick and PC worked again for a day. When it did it again I tried removing one stick to see if I had bad ram. Still did not work. Tried other stick, still did not work. Removed both put back in then it worked.

Ran ram memory test in vista and it said no errors. Hard drive test showed no errors.

Side note: LED light that shows "AC power connected" intermittently goes out. No new software. No updates. Just prior to this problem the start up wav file would skip a couple times like a broken CD. Logitech Laptop cooling fan used when PC on.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

You could try replacing the RAM, I'm fairly sure the RAM you need for this laptop is relatively cheap.

sounds more like a display issue (especially if windows boots normally as far as you can tell). if you run a good memory testing program and it comes up fine then chances are really good that it isn't the RAM. try connecting an external monitor to see if it is more likely the display.

if it was a graphics card issue i'd expect you to get blue screens and freezes. it shouldn't be a heat issue since this happens at cold boot. but to be extra sure you could run a graphics stress testing program like furmark.

bad power can do lots of crazy things to a computer, so you should definitely look into the potential issues indicated by the power LED issue. unfortunately i think there's very little that you can actually do on this yourself except google for others' experiences with the same model laptop.

ram test showed no errors, tried another AC cord no help, tried 2nd display nothing on screen.

if i buy another pc can i transfer hold em manager with all stats over?

thanks for the help.

That is definetly possible. You might still wanna try the cheap RAM. I know the RAM test shows no errors, but it's an option you haven't exhausted yet and you can always resell the RAM afterwards so it might effectively cost you something like 20$ to see if this fixes the problem.
It sounds like some chip on your motherboard could be fried though.

HP actually has an entire support page dedicated to the problem you're having. i'm actually kind of shocked how thorough and exhaustive it is.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...roduct=3860557

i can't say that i'm sure the memory is fine because i don't know exactly what HP's built in memory test does, but if you run memtest86 or memtest86+ (free downloads, only costs you a CD-R and your time) and it comes up fine then it's 99.9% not the memory.