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DIY Laptop Repair
Jul. 3rd, 2009 12:50 pmJust as I've been getting better, it's now my work laptop that has become terminally ill - starting yesterday evening after I got back from taking Whitney to the airport, it would manage to get two minutes into Windows before freezing up completely, with no hard drive activity, PC speaker warning noises or response to any input (including being hit with a hammer). After some searching around, I found out that this symptom matched up to a known problem with the T40 range - basically, it's dying of a design fault that causes one or more vital components to become unsoldered from the main board after a couple of years, meaning that the whole thing can die with the slightest amount of movement if it finds the processor suddenly missing. On the advice of another forum I found, to test this diagnosis, I ran it with this crude fix yesterday morning:
And with weight placed on the spot below the keyboard, that allowed it to survive for hours rather than the couple of minutes that it had managed on every other attempt, though obviously it made it slightly difficult to use. During that time I took the opportunity to back up as many useful files as I could think of, and sent a message about its impending death to my boss, who - after a tricky Indiana Jones-like moment when I had to roll the water bottle off it and keep it clamped together while reading the serial number off the bottom - is organizing a replacement.
That'll take a while to arrive, though, and in the meantime I attempted a do-it-yourself solution suggested by the Internet, because as we all know my ability in this area is second only to my cooking.
( Thinkpad repair - a photo guide )
And with this unlikely and unorthodox solution in place, it seems to be running quite healthily, even if it does have an awkward bulge underneath the Space bar. I would at least hazard that it'll be as usable as usual until proper salvation arrives.
And with weight placed on the spot below the keyboard, that allowed it to survive for hours rather than the couple of minutes that it had managed on every other attempt, though obviously it made it slightly difficult to use. During that time I took the opportunity to back up as many useful files as I could think of, and sent a message about its impending death to my boss, who - after a tricky Indiana Jones-like moment when I had to roll the water bottle off it and keep it clamped together while reading the serial number off the bottom - is organizing a replacement.
That'll take a while to arrive, though, and in the meantime I attempted a do-it-yourself solution suggested by the Internet, because as we all know my ability in this area is second only to my cooking.
( Thinkpad repair - a photo guide )
And with this unlikely and unorthodox solution in place, it seems to be running quite healthily, even if it does have an awkward bulge underneath the Space bar. I would at least hazard that it'll be as usable as usual until proper salvation arrives.
