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Laptop Repair Videos, Podcasts & Tips

Anyone that has worked in the Computer Repair field will know that laptops are a very different animal than your average desktop PC.  Although they share a lot of similar concepts, in terms of hardware, repairing them is a whole different art.  This article includes a lot of laptop specific tips that I used including laptop repair videos.

When I started in computer repair, it was laptops that I was primarily interested in.  It was more of a niche market that I thought would be good to get into.  So I bought a few broken/spares/repairs laptops off ebay to practice taking them apart, and see what was inside.

You very quickly learn that although the general concept of taking them apart tends to be quite similar, each model of laptop can have it’s own problems.  Tiny screws hidden under rubber bumpers, cables that have to be fed through a hole in the motherboard, the list goes on.. Continue reading

Defragment your hard disk easily using JKDefrag

Over time, the hard disk on your computer can become very disorganised.  Files get written to the disk, some get deleted, more files get written, and so on.  Every time a file gets deleted, the space it occupied is available to be reused.  But if the new file you want to write is too large to be written to that space, what happens is that a piece of the file gets written there, and another piece gets written somewhere else.  This process of breaking files up into smaller pieces when writing them to the hard disk is known as Fragmentation.  The files are said to be Fragmented.

As more files get written and deleted, this fragmentation of the hard disk increases.  More files are being broken up into smaller chunks, making the hard disk work harder trying to read back all the fragments. Continue reading

How to Reflow a Laptop Motherboard

This article describes a reflow procedure that can be performed at home in a conventional household oven for a common laptop motherboard repair of the broken graphics chip.

What is a Reflow?

The term ‘reflow’ describes a process of briefly melting (reflowing) the solder on an electrical circuit board, in this case a laptop motherboard.

Why would you perform a Reflow on a laptop motherboard?

The solder used in laptop motherboards tends to degrade over time, becoming brittle and weak. It can change from being a solid block of solder into more of a honeycomb structure. This weaker solder joint can fracture causing tiny broken connections in the circuit, invisible to the naked eye. The idea behind performing a reflow is that it melts the solder, allowing it to form a solid block again and joining up the electrical circuit. Continue reading