Repairing a Dell Laptop

Disclaimer - you may find this little story of my life utterly boring; proceed at your own risk.

I thought I would share this after the latest discussion on computers.

I was helping out at the annual parish garage sale for the day, when someone brought in a Dell Inspiron 15 M5030 laptop. It was labeled "for parts" without a hard drive. The rest of it looked fine otherwise. It was stickied for $5, so I set it aside to take home.

Got it home, plugged it in, and attempted to boot into BIOS. The fan spun up for about 3 seconds, and shut off. 7 very loud, consecutive beeps followed. After repeating this a few times and opening it up to find nothing wrong, I Googled it. Apparently, almost every laptop in this series has this same problem. Dell would come and replace the motherboard, sometimes 3 times a week to "fix" the issue. After the warranty expired, they dropped it and refused to recognize the manufacturing flaw.

A few more days of looking brought some sliver of hope. As a last resort, a handful of people were able to re-flow the solder on the motherboard with a heat gun. It was a long, complicated process, but I decided I would try it once I found a deal on a gun. A couple days later Northern Tools sent me some coupons that could get a gun for $6. Bought that, and did a little more research before trying it. While I was doing that, I found out you can bake the motherboard in a conventional oven and yield the same results. Thought that would be easier to try first. Cover all plastic parts and bake at 380 for 10 minutes. How hard can it be? If it doesn't work the first time, you are supposed to keep doing it for longer until something happens, good or bad. I do have a heat gun now which I have no idea what to do with.

So 10 minutes later and surprisingly no foul odors, I removed the board and let it cool for 35 minutes. I Carefully carried it down the stairs and plugged everything back into the laptop. Install battery. Plug in power supply. Press power button.

It booted into BIOS! We put Linux onto a SD card and booted it from there. Later, I installed a 160GB drive and gave Linux 14 Mint a 30GB partition in hopes of getting Windows 7.

What goes bad are the solder joints underneath the CPU socket. The cheap Chinese assembly left it with weak, sometimes cold solder joints. Reflowing the board returned all the contacts and joints to a solid, strong bond.

It has been working great for 2 months now. I use it mostly for school and web browsing. (it does these wonderfully) I had to replace the battery which had gone flat.

I recently found a product key for Windows 7. I am going to try to activate an OEM download disc with it, and create a second partition on the drive. I like that Linux is streamlined and easy to use, but have only found 1 program that will run with Wine. This is very aggravating. Windows is more practical.

I need to move and complete my iTunes library.

I can't view 1 or 2 document formats.

None of my Simulators work, among other things.

Flash and Google images have completely crashed in Chrome, and a little in Firefox.

Such a relief from my Dell Optiplex GX270 desktop though - so painfully slow. All I could really use it for was music and surfing some of the web.

Specs:

AMD Athlon II 2.3ghz CPU

4GB of DDR RAM

512MB of dedicated graphics memory

ATI Radeon graphics card

Atheros WiFi card

160GB Apple Hitachi HD (would like 360GB)

Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon edition OS

Not a bad investment for less than 25 bucks - less than 2 years old.

Thank you for reading.