Problem: Display flickers.  Reboot, monitor flickers and is hard to read and the display eventually shuts off where you are no longer able to determine if there is a problem with the computer or just the display.  Customer pretty much given up on usage as the machine no longer is usable as it had been in the past.  2nd problem is the computer does not work if the AC adapter is not attached.

Specifications: Pavillon dv8, Model dv85 -100, Product NQ226A

Methodology:

Trace method:

1.  Connect Video Graphics Array (VGA) display to the 15 pin analog external port (left side).  There are both an analog and a digital HDMI port to connect an external display to I chose the VGA randomly because I already had the cables available.  Once the cables were connected and the monitor attached I then proceeded to reboot the laptop.  

2.  The second item to trace was disk activity.  I was careful to watch the front left side of the laptop where the power, activity and disk LED were indeed displaying lots of activity as the machine began to boot.  I was hopeful that there was not a disk issue which sometimes masks other issues by not seeing activity produced by the boot PROM for normal startup procedures.  The two events worth tracing were if there was a video display from the external display once connected and if there was disk activity being observed after the monitor began to register video prompts such as BIOS functions on the screen.  In this troubleshooting session both sequences occurred helping to further determine where the problem was not.

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