Saturday, October 6, 2007

Taking apart a laptop

I forgot pictures, but I've been doing surgery on our laptop today.

We bought a Toshiba P35-S6111 a couple of years ago. We needed a laptop that was more desktop-py, and it fit the need. It's certainly a luggable.

There are several known flaws with the P35s. They clog their CPU fans with dust bunnies pretty quickly. I've had to invest in air cans to clean the coils off. Then, a couple of weeks ago the laptop quit charging.

The Internet is so nice. The plug on Toshibas of the P35 era break under any pressure, leading to problems like ours. Of course, our two-year support deal was over, so I was either looking at paying a couple of hundred to get someone else to fix it or I fix it. Duh. ;)

As I mentioned, this problem is common, so there's a lot of plugs for sale on Ebay (and I buy one). I just have to unsoldier the old one, and soldier the new one in, without cooking the board.

It just took two Wal-Mart runs and three burns, but I did it. And then I gilded the lilly: I took the CPU fans and heat sink off and re-gunked the heat sink. The CPU is now wanting to stay hot, so I had to turn it down a notch (the games will LOVE that....).

When I get the new speakers in (did I mention I broke a speaker? oops...), I'll also have to redo the CPU heat sinks....

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