dfeerst

I've dealt with many odd desktop and laptop problems in the past but this is definately the strangest. I was hoping there is someone else out there with a HP Pavilion dv9000 or similar model that may have seen something like this or has any suggestion about what it might be.

About a month ago, for no apparent reason my laptop rebooted without warning, or (visible) error message. The real problem is that it would not come back up. In fact the screen was blank. Just the back light. Listening too it I could hear it going through the boot sequence but instead of loading windows it would continue to reboot and repeat the process over and over as long as I would let it. I wasn't able to get in to the CMOS. I assume this because pressing the keys didn't stop the boot sequence, however since the screen was blank I couldn't really tell. Boot disks had no effect. It still continued to reboot. Over the next few weeks I periodically would try to work with it with no different results. Finally I borrowed my daughters monitor.(she wasn't happy about that) and hooked it up to the VGA port to see what would happen. It booted. there was lots of noise (video glitching, not the audible kind) So much it was difficult to read much, but It successfully booted. once windows loaded The screen corrected itself and looked fine. Simultaneously, to my amazement, my laptop screen came to life and seemed to run perfectly. I spent a while looking for signs of trouble, including hardware errors. Device manager hadn't found any errors and there was nothing in my error log. I unplugged the external monitor, and rebooted and it loaded again correctly. I tinkered around for another 20 minutes or so and unable to find the cause, I decided I would get back to work. I stuck a working thumb drive in the thing and It crashed, instantly. Same as it did before. It was doing the same thing with the dead monitor and rebooting constantly. I hooked it back up to the external and it came back up working properly. I decided at the point that maybe there was some type of voltage problem with my USB ports. thinking back to when it first died I was probably using a thumb drive then too. So I decided I would discontinue use of my usb ports and use the computer like normal to see if that made a difference. It lasted a day. The next night, in the middle of writing a paper it started acting up again. I was switching windows. and I noticed that those stupid aero vista windows that appear when you mouse over another application in the start bar were illegible. they were filled with noise. 20 seconds later the whole screen filled with it, it rebooted and I'm back where I started.
Has anyone ever seen anything like this.
I'm ready to gank the hard drive and toss the rest out the window....
Like I said it's a HP DV9000. It's two years old, out of warranty (of course).
Their tech support is useless and they charge for it now. Not that I think they could help anyway. It seems like a hardware issue. I don't think its is the screen anymore. I'm still suspecting some type of voltage problem and wondering if that is affecting my video card. I think the video card is replacable in this thing because it's a g-force go model, but there is no way I'm replacing anything until I know for certain what the problem is.