Amateur Geek - Fixing a laptop

[Bubbs]

Good evening all,

I decided that I wanted to get into laptop maintenance and repair and had a few laptops laying around that I thought would make great projects to get working. I currently have 2 laptops that I want to get working right as they are decent specimens.

I bought a soldering iron and solder, anti static wrist band, some tiny screw drivers and some compressed air and jumped in both feet first... but I feel I may have been way to hasty.

I would hopefully like to get some help on 2 laptops that have stumped me. One is the Compaq Presario CQ62 and the other is the Acer Aspire 5920g. I managed to get one working which was a massive sense of achievement and I'm currently typing on it.

Anyhow i'll start with the acer:

Acer
So the laptop was working but overheating, I stripped the laptop down without using the service manual and cleaned the heatsync with compressed air, and put some new thermal paste on the processor. I did accidentally drop the processor but it landed on the shiny side and I hope it hasn't caused damage. Anyway I put it all back together and turned it on and all was working fine, then after about 30mins the screen went blank and started getting glitchy.

So I found the service manual and decided to strip it down properly, and follow the exact sequence. After putting it all back together it turns on, and the acer logo pops up, the screen that says press f2 for setup but it holds there and goes no further.

The laptop sounds healthy, and the fan is working.

How do I find out what's causing the issue? I have a couple of spare processors from other laptops that I can try (not sure on compatibility?)

Anyhow, with your help I would love to get these working and to expand my knowledge on the subject.
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Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

[Frost]

Generally when something starts overheating people just keep using it and put up with the crashing until it is totally fucked. by that point it needs a new CPU or graphics card, which is usually built in to the motherboard. Both can be more money than it is worth.

[Bubbs]

[Wabby]

You will be needing a hot air rework station if you wish to get into this field - as 99.9% of issues with modern laptops that are not plug and play removable items (CPU, RAM, HDD, etc) are usually down to unleaded solder and GPU's / other IC's on the boards.
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What restriction?

[CaNsA]

glitchy?

example...?

[bazza]

[Going]

Why don't you do some hacking and see if you can get one of the laptops working from bits from both.

[Seb]

That Acer is an nForce based machine and thus a huge waste of time frankly.

When you turn it on and it hangs at the acer logo, will it switch off on the power button? or do you have to hold the button down/pull the power to turn it off?

If it switches off on a tap of the button things are looking good, it's posting but isn't managing to attempt to find an OS, check both the DVD and HDD are powered and that the boot order is trying them first.

Otherwise (And rather more likely being nvidia) it's likely going to need a reflow. Look for the northbridge on the mainboard, if that's marked as nVidia that's likely your culprit, if it's an intel part then things get a little complex, you'll probably have a modular GPU in an MXM socket. That's where I'd start.

Good luck!
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2010 Triumph 1050 Sprint ST

[daemonoid]

[prawny1]

older laptops generaly have thermal pads on the gpu, did you remove this and replace with tim? if so chances are the heatsink isn't actualy making contact with the chip and overheated enough to do damage already.

If not try reseating all your ram, hdd, dvd drives etc and removing any usb or memory cars you have plugged in.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Scotsman37]

Could be the case someone used a can of air duster while the laptop was on, but when it blows out extremely cold which will be damp at 1st before evaporating may have caused a short on the board or you inadvertently cracked the solder on one the connections?

Remove memory to see if it beeps an error code for not find memory and if it does then it is possible you've got a bad DIMM otherwise try disconnecting the HDD cable and then reconnect it in case it is hanging there a boot up?

[Jamie.]

When you see the splash screen (Acer logo) press TAB, that should show you the POST process and see which device it sticks on.