Rebuilding broken computers Options

[Triggerhappy]

Not sure if this is the place for this topic.

I was given a Dell laptop computer last week. The owner told me I could keep it, do what ever I want with it...
Burning it was my first thought :-)

I stripped it down to nothing, cleaned and assembled.
Booted and runs flawlessly, Windosw 7 Ultimate with 4gig of ram.
Told the previous owner that it works, he was stunned. A friend of his "in the know" told him it was worthless.

Have you ever repaired something even when you have been told it will never work ?

[Zzozzach]

Yep, many times. I did something similar with a laptop about 9 years ago. Turned out all that had happened was the IDE cable on the HDD had somehow worked loose. Once that was fixed it worked fine. Since it was a workplace writeoff I got to keep it for myself.

It also used to happen a lot to me with floppy drives. I never could quite figure it out but they would stubbornly refuse to work for a system/power/cable/whatever. I'd swap around one piece of the puzzle or another and, Hey Presto!, it would work again. It got to the point where I always carried a spare FDD and cable with me in my toolkit, and when I swapped something I'd just keep it and reuse it at the next job.

It's incredible how much abuse a modern computer will put up with, and how much abuse people will dish out to them, but at some point they just can't take any more. Often all they need is a bit of TLC, like you did, and they magically come to life again.

BTW, well done. I hope it gives you a boost to your troubleshooting skills. :)

[aliali]

Not sure if this is the place for this topic.

I was given a Dell laptop computer last week. The owner told me I could keep it, do what ever I want with it...
Burning it was my first thought :-)

I stripped it down to nothing, cleaned and assembled.
Booted and runs flawlessly, Windosw 7 Ultimate with 4gig of ram.
Told the previous owner that it works, he was stunned. A friend of his "in the know" told him it was worthless.

Have you ever repaired something even when you have been told it will never work ?

In a similar vein I gave a quote to a lady to reinstall XP (inc data backup and restore), add more ram, get a new battery and generally check out the laptop and she said nah, 'think I will just get a new laptop as I am now working full time'.
So she just gave me the old one and said do what I want with it.
Not a bad little Intel T2400 based LGE 15" square unit. Just waiting for the new battery to arrive, already taken the RAM to 2Gb (most it will take from what I can find) and installed win 7 32 bit (32 bit CPU only). Seems to run fine although the HDD is only 100gb.

[nobody813]

I'm typing this on an Acer Aspire 4810T that was given to me for nothing. It had gravy spilt all over it, and it "died". I got it for nothing, and pulled it to bits and cleaned it up. Put it back together, and it works flawlessly. I'm using this for uni, and am enjoying the 8hr battery life it has :-D

[grimalias]

I happened to have a Pentium 3 pc with Dota and D2 in it, and i took the parts out and put in a new case chasis and it just sparked... and died.

Dammit all.

I never knew what i did wrong. Except one thing. No antistatic straps... and what are risers? ... = / Also put on a new modern PSU probrably did it in...

[fajw]

Yeah; my brother gave me his PC and it turned out to work fine.

This post has been edited by fajw: Jun 9 2012, 10:23 AM