Cockroaches Living in a Laptop
Friday, January 29, 2010
We’re used to seeing lots of “computer bugs” but we only see this kind about once a year.
This filthy laptop came in the other day full of cockroaches. Live cockroaches. We promptly put it in a large contractor trash bag and blasted it with fogger. We’re not even going to look at it again until next week. But we will. It is very rare we say this, but this will need major cleaning and additional labor if these people want it fixed. All the fecal matter and other legs and such floating around in there are not good. We had many more pictures, but we’ll just share this one. You get the idea.
Most of the dead cockroaches were under the keyboard. The big fat ones were living in the bottom of the laptop near the heatsink/fan area. Must’ve been nice and warm in there. A couple were so large they couldn’t get out, which means their only source of food was- other dead cockroaches!!!!
Labels: laptop repair
posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 7:03 AM,
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Wax On, Wax Off
Monday, April 20, 2009
We figured that this laptop repair was blog-worthy. A candle burning on a mantle burned down and melted. The liquid wax ran off the edge of the mantle and onto this open HP laptop. The user was away eating a sandwich. They came back to this mess! A laptop covered in wax! The keyboard was ruined and the unit was covered in wax.
Being a previous AbsoluteRaleigh customer they rushed the unit over here. We were able to replace the keyboard and clean the unit up for under $100! Most of the laptop was cleaned using our special citrus cleaner, alcohol and glass cleaner.
Be careful with your laptop, Danielson!
Labels: HP, laptop repair
posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 12:19 PM,
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Wilmington NC Laptop Repair
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
We had a Lenovo 3000 N100 notebook come in this week. Our customer lives in Wilmington, NC but brought their machine to us for a second opinion. The local shop to them in Wilmington told them that their laptop motherboard needed to be replaced and that the boards were around $600. When they called we informed them that our diagnostics are free and that we would be happy to check the unit out. The unit would turn on but would shut off when they tried to access the Internet.
They dropped the machine off and we took a look at it. The laptop would shut off after being on for just a minute or two- it didn't matter if the Internet was accessed or not. The unit was simply overheating. The area where the hot air is supposed to blow out was clogged with dust. We thoroughly cleaned it out. The unit also only has 512MB RAM and it supported DDR2. DDR2 memory is very cheap right now and our customer authorized us to bump the machine up to 2GB RAM which quadrupled the amount of memory.
The laptop now runs fast and cool!It was also repaired about 75% less than what the other people quoted, and correctly repaired.
Labels: laptop repair, Lenovo
posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 7:17 PM,
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Apple iBook Logic Board Repair
Affected models: Laptops with serial numbers in the following range: UV117XXXXXX to UV342XXXXXX. iBooks with the serial numbers listed above may be referred to as:
* iBook (16 VRAM)
* iBook (14.1 LCD 16 VRAM)
* iBook (Opaque 16 VRAM)
* iBook (32 VRAM)
* iBook (14.1 LCD 32 VRAM)
* iBook (800MHz 32 VRAM)
* iBook (900MHz 32 VRAM)
* iBook (14.1 LCD 900MHz 32 VRAM)
* iBook (Dual USB)
* iBook (Late 2001)
* iBook (14.1 LCD)
These laptops have GPUs on the motherboard / logic board which may fail and cause the following symptoms:
* Scrambled or distorted video
* Appearance of unexpected lines on the screen
* Intermittent video image
* Video freeze
* Computer starts up to blank screen
Apple was covering these issues for quite a while but the warranty period is over.
Home remedy:
A home remedy has been implemented for the G3 laptops with some success. Read about it here.
Labels: Apple, laptop repair
posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 6:43 PM,
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Toshiba M55 Problems in Cary, NC
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
This is a follow up entry to our blog posting regarding bad computer stores.
Our customer took their machine to the G**k squad. She paid them about $70 to diagnose her machine. They shiped it off to some undisclosed location. She demanded it back. 6 weeks later it came back diagnosed with a "bad motherboard".
She brought it to us since we specialize in free diagnostics of laptop repair.
upon inspection and the unit turning on we could hear the system making some normal POST beeps and we immediately knoew the sound on the motherboard was ok. We got into Windows XP and the driver was disabled. It could not be re-enabled so we instantly know to check the hard drive at that point.
Testing the hard drive revealed some bad sectors. We were able to replace the hard drive using a new hard drive in stock which came with a 3yr warranty. Laptop hard drives are under $100. We backed up the requested data and moved it to the new drive.
The unit was in and out of here in business 3 days.
Our customer is a Doctor who assists with Aids patients in Africa. We were able to get the unit back to her just before her trip. She almost had to leave without the machine due to the inexperienced people at the other store. On top of that they had quoted her around $950.
Unfortunately, we see this kind of thing daily here.
Labels: Cary, laptop repair
posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 8:16 AM,
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HP ZE4145 vs. Super Glue
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
We had a HP ZE4145 laptop come in for our backlight repair service this week. Our customer told us that the machine worked fine one day, then the next it had no display. They could slightly see what was going on but the backlight was not lighting up.
Note: Most of the machines we get in for backlight repair actually do not need a backlight.
Anyways upon inspection we noticed the hibernate button was stuck down. Well, it wasn't just stuck down but it was glued down with some super glue.
Fortunately on this model the little hibernate button resides on it's own little board. We had the board in stock @ $29. We charged our customer our minimum labor charge and got this one back out the door. When our customer came to pick it up they told us that their 10yr old had been playing with the glue near the computer the night before it quit working which explained everything.
For more information on backlight repair please see our backlight FAQ.
Labels: backlight, laptop repair
posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 1:47 PM,
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