HP HDX16 won’t boot; blinking lights (NK133AV)

I got in an HP HDX16 laptop from a customer that wouldn’t turn on at all. The hard drive light would blink orange and the CAPS LOCK and NUM LOCK lights would continually flash. (It would do that for a few seconds, turn off, then stay on with the blinking lights continually actually.) Removing the hard drive, DVD drive and RAM didn’t help. I took out the hard drive and successfully copied over 100GB of data, so that wasn’t the problem.

With the help of a laptop repair expert, we determined that the motherboard was destroyed by heat an electrical problem confined to an area about 3 inches square. (Upon further inspection by another electrician, he thinks this was an electrical malfunction of some sort. Both guys that looked at it thought the board had been fixed in some way, probably at the factory before it was sold to the end user.) In the picture below (click on it to see a high quality picture), you’ll see burn marks on the board and some of the chips are actually off center from getting too hot and moving (PQ15, PQ14,PQ11 as marked on the board):

The motherboard is HP 519592-001, which as of today is easily found on eBay for under $200.  In this case, the power jack was not working well and adding the cost of the repair itself, the customer elected not to repair it (wisely). A big concern to me is how it got too hot in the first place. I would imagine that the same thing would just happen again.

Please comment if you’ve had this problem, as I didn’t find much in my own searches prior to writing this.