I luv the internet.

Must I say more?  OK, I'll expand on that thought a little bit.  I have a nice HP laptop which is nearly 3 years old.  Ancient as far as computers go, but should still have a lot of life in it.  Well, KT turned it on the other day and we just got the black screen of death.  Booooo!  With the enormous and quite depressing cost of moving abroad, I did not look forward to forking out more of our hard-earned life savings for a replacement.  Booo again.  So I'm doing everything I can think of to fix the dumb thing, and I found a way to "pull the codes", to borrow a common car term, and find out what the computer thought that the problem was.  It was the cpu.  To replace it would be borderline the cost of a new laptop.  Boooo again.  Out of desperation, I googled "hp tx2 bad cpu" and read through pages of disgruntled people complaining about the same thing that I was experiencing.  It looked like the site moderator must have been very busy keeping everything clean.  

Anyway, I stumbled on some awesomely-crazy soul who had a brilliant idea: I took the whole thing apart, stripped all components off of the motherboard that I could, and put it in the oven.  How awesome is that?  I put the dumb thing in the @#$#%# oven!  325 for 8 minutes.  Wrapped in foil no less.  If it weren't for the smell of overheated solder, I would have been tempted to take a bite to make sure it was done all the way through.  I put it back together, and sure enough it started up again.  Oh, and I said a little prayer before turning it on.  Nerves were rather high at that point.  

Well, to make sense of it all, here's the "scientific explanation."  The cooling system is inadequate in this model, and the cpu overheats easily.  When that happens, the solder can get soft and some of the components can lose contact with the circuit board.  So baking it softens the solder again, and I guess you just hope that things set right this time.  They did.

So, to PrototypeNM1, that anonymous hero prowling the back alleys of tech forums, I salute you.  Go Prototype NM1, go.