HP ZBook 15 G4 Refurbishment/Upgrade Project

[Will]

Another one for the collection. Same old story: one day I was mindlessly scrolling through OLX out of boredom and stumbled upon this machine for sale. It was listed as defective and "for parts", not turning on, but the screen, graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro M1000M 2GB), keyboard, and battery (health unknown) had been tested and were working perfectly. Looking at the exterior, the chassis is pretty badly damaged, as you can see in the photos below. Even so, I figured it would be a good deal for the price, whether to restore it or sell off the working parts. I decided to restore and upgrade it, so I'll be posting the progress of this project in this topic. One final note: this laptop is originally a 15 G3 (with an i7-6820HQ), but I'll be turning it into a 15 G4 by swapping out the motherboard.

Here are the listing photos taken by the seller:






And here’s a photo of the internals:



Signs of attempted repair:

[Will]

UPDATE #1:

 

The screen was actually working perfectly. I sold it to a friend for pretty much half of what the entire laptop cost me. I also started researching and buying the necessary parts for this project, the first item being a brand new ZBook 15 G4 motherboard with a Xeon E3-1505M v6 (CPW50 LA-E161P 921049-601). Again, I'll be buying most of the parts from China, on sites like Taobao and Xianyu.




It was a bit tricky to test the motherboard because I was too lazy to completely disassemble the laptop, and on top of that, I didn't have an AC adapter with the right plug for the ZBook. So, I had to use a 7.4mmx5.0mm to 4.5mmx3.0mm adapter that I got from AliExpress with an HP OMEN AC adapter, but in the end, everything worked out fine. Side note: the screen used for testing was taken from a ZBook 15 G2 that I also acquired. I'll make a separate topic for it in the future.






The motherboard is working perfectly and apparently had never been turned on before, according to the "Machine is not in committed state!" message displayed during boot. I still need to do more research on this and how to "fix it", so if anyone knows how and can help me out, I'd appreciate it.

During testing, I also took the opportunity to install and test the NVIDIA Quadro K1100M that came in the ZBook 15 G2 I mentioned earlier. The driver installation apparently went fine, but it threw a Code 43 error in Device Manager. I'm not sure if the card itself is faulty or if I messed up the driver modding, since it had been a while since I last used NVCleanstall. Also, during boot, a "cooling fan error" message popped up, and I noticed that the fan behavior was a bit weird, with them revving up and slowing down repeatedly.