How easy is it to replace a motherboard in a notebook?

[FouTight]

this is pretty much as hard as it gets as far as hardware work goes, but it's not worth $450 to have someone do it. If you can find the board for around $100 it would probably be worth doing, even just to sell it as a workign laptop.

what are the symptoms that make them think it's a bad motherboard?

[Kablooie]

You may also want to get back to HP. Repairs usually have their own warrenty that continues even if the original one expires. For Apple it's 3 months after the repair for any damage that could reasonably be associated with the repair, and the repair itself. I don't know about HP.

[StoneAge]

I already tried that- The guy in support said once the warranty is over, thats it, end of story. I am not sure that he knew what he was talking about, he took a long time to figure out what I was asking.

[darkcore]

warranty is over? to me it looks like it went bad within the warranty and they didn't fix it. another call might be an option, too.

if hp won't do anything about it go with option #2.

[StoneAge]

They did a diagnostics, they only told me the results, I am not savy enough to even guess what was entailed.

The reason I took it in was because the screen is blank when it starts up- which is similar to what happend the first time the motherboard went bad.