It will work for few weeks most. Solder balls are rarely the problem lately. Most likely it's the chip itself. You can test that easily.. If you heat up a chip to about 100°C and it works then it's the chip.. If it's still dead then you try reflowing the solder by preheating the motherboard to about 180, and then heat only the chip to 230 for 1 minute max. Before that you should remove the thermal glue from the corners of the chip and apply some flux at about 130-150°C in the preheat phase. If it works after reflowing the solder then it's the solder balls... I own a repair shop and I do that kind of stuff ONLY to make sure that everything else on motherboard is working and to confirm the diagnosis, then I replace the chip with a new one.
I have a laptop that I had to reflow the south-bridge to make it work again, one thing thing I've learned though, reflowing will be much more efficient and durable if you apply no clean liquid flux with a syringe before applying heat, I usually put the board vertical and apply from the top edge of the IC until I see the flux coming out from the bottom then I lay it horizontal to apply the heat. I also put a thermo coupler to control the temperature, I aim for 240 to 250ºC for about 40 seconds.
I'd try a few things make sure the fan isn't stuck, make sure the heatsink fins aren't clogged with dust, reapply new thermal paste, and if that won't work try replacing BIOS battery.
Nice video. I would highly recommend some low density flux injected under the GPU or CPU next time. It will help the solder to flow. Using a heat gun with that sort of flow is also pretty risky. I guess luck was on your side that time :-) Might not last too long however from my experience. Good luck with it. :-)
That's a great tip Dave thanks for posting the video. I got an old Dell in for repair and it has a video issue where it shows two horizontal desktops split in the middle of the screen. Also the screen is very dark to look at. So I'm going the try the heat gun trick and see if it works. I been watching your RU-vid channel for sometime now and I find it great, plenty of tech data and no stupid music playing makes it a great channel. I was wondering how you find working on very small components with such big fat fingers if you'll forgive me I had to laugh watching you trying to plug in those WI-FI plugs with those big fingers. Anyway Thankyou for all your videos I have not watched them all yet but I am getting there.
I don't repair computers. This was my old laptop. Yes it still works when I fire it up, which is rarely these days as it is pretty slow compared to the one i replaced it with. I have a dual boot set up on this so only use it to run the odd Linux app.
That might work temporarily, but probably not enough heat to reball the chip. I used a heat gun, and as of right now, this computer is still running. I am actually responding to this message using said computer. I think it is time to do a follow up video to prove the naysayers that said it would not last that they were wrong as it has been 3 years and it is still running.
Cool to see it come back to life! I am curious if the laptop and the TV are still working 5 months later. The "experts" say that these failures usually have nothing to do wtih the BGA solder balls; the heat-gunning just "fixes" a failed chip temporarily by shifting things around internally.
To answer that question. I am replying to you on that laptop right now.I am also sure that in some cases the chip is bad, and heating it up restores an internal bond wire that bonds the silicon die to the outside world, but some of the problems are BGA flow problems that were not detected during xray of the board during assembly.
Smashing :-D, an old frend is alive :-D It doesnt take much to upset the boot system. Dont forget to vett the windows updates, there is an o.s upgrade that will take over and force windows 10 on to you, if you like win 7 then beware :-(. . I have an old acer aspire 5315 that i use, it has the same access for the cpu/ram/gpu, the hard drive is under the same flap, not quite as nice as yours but not bad. Last time i did a fan+heatsink clean, i did the compound on the cpu and made sure the gpu was ok. I dont think this model suffers with gpu solder but im not going to give it a chance lol.
+zx8401ztv After shooting the video, I actually put some flux under the chip, and reheated it for about 30 seconds before reassembling. The initial blast of heat shown on the video was just to confirm that the solder was indeed the problem. Once I confirmed it was working, I sat down, and reflowed it a second time, being a little more bold with the heat gun the second time. At this point I had a shot of it firing up, so I didn't bother filming the rest, just in case I buggered it up. That never happen right.
+12voltvids Noooo that would not of happened to you LOL :-D But i did bugger up one machine, lesson learnt, learn on things that dont matter :-D. Smashing, you have swiped the machine away from the jaws of the reaper :-D, kick that reaper :->
You make that look easy, nice fix. BTW how do you deal with that Win 10 downloading being done in the background sort of forcing Win 10 on us who do not want Win 10 and want to stay with Win 7?
+old64goat I never get the nag on my laptop.I did upgrade to win10 on it, and found too many apps that I own didn't play well, so I rolled back, and started getting the nag every day, so I googled and found there was a registry hack to stop it (forgot by now) and that was it. No more nag. My desktop I keep getting the "reserve" your copy nag I I just say no thanks, and move on. SO far no forced download. Unfortunately my kids did take it, and didn't check "I am on a metered internet connection" wich resulted is those FUC&^%G machines being turned into Microsoft reflector servers and driving my internet bill through the roof for a month. My ISP at the time had a cap of 150 gigs a month, and then 10.00 for each additional 50 gig. In that first month after launch, my kids computers blasted out almost 1200 gigs, and that is 1050 over my monthly cap. That drove my internet bill to over 100 extra in charges for excessive usage. We used to get unlimited usage, but last year my ISB rolled in data limits, and then offer an unlimited plan. Problem is I find it hard to justify paying extra for internet use, as I rarely top 100 gigs a month, so that bill shock was a major hit. That's to Microsoft.
+12voltvids Incredible! Didn't know that that could happen. I'm safely sticking to windows 7, at least until the first major service pack. To get rid of the nag, you just need to remove an update: KB3035583, then check that you don't want to be notified about this one anymore.
the KB3035583 keeps coming back, now I just ignore that "nag" at the taskbar, my computer told me nothing can be done to keep it away, he told me just do not click on "install"
+old64goat After checking for updates, when windows update reports new available updates, just right click the nagupdate and click 'hide update'. It hasn't come back here!
No offense but you only need a pea size drop of the paste on the cpu. Too mucn will actually cause overheating as it acts as an insulation. Its only to have good contact with the copper.
I just tried this on the same model laptop I had found that was not working with no picture. It fired up after using the heat gun, but the screen has a bunch of distorted lines and is flickering. I think I may have applied too much heat. Is there any way to correct this?
+Koffi Banan Still working. Using it now! Time will tell. I did have to re-do my Onkyo just the other day. It lasted for what 9 months of use every day. This time I used a heat gun instead of the halogen bulb so will see how long it goes this time.
+12voltvids So the heat gun fixed the Onkyo a second time? Did you use flux the first time with the halogen bulb? Heat gun + flux seems may be a better fix. Time will tell!
+Piotr Misiuna Risk I was willing to take. It was a garbage laptop anyway. I had already replaced it, and I will only be firing it up to test the fix, as it is too slow for my daily use these days.I wouldn't do this on someone else's laptop. I would tell them their motherboard is toast and send them on their way.
+Amy Marie You only saw the initial reheat. After the camera was off, and before reassembling the unit totally I put some flux under the chips and had lots of flux bubbling and smoking when I cooked the chips a second time to ensure a lasting repair. Time will tell, but I will be firing this laptop up every day, and running the GPU through its paces.
+Bill B Thanks, the good outweigh the bad, but I have my haters out there. Me thinks it is sour grapes from people in the business that are not too happy with me showing simple fixes that they charge people to do.
I think it's more that they don't want to see a) people charging money for heat-gun "service" when it won't last, which makes people less trusting of repair shops in general, or b) people destroying expensive devices like Macbooks that would have been repairable if they hadn't done this. If it's an old device that's otherwise bound for the scrap heap, then sure, fire away and see what happens.
Which is exactly what this laptop was. It had already been replaced, and was ready for the scrap pile, but now it is working again, and 5 months later is still working.
+Darryl Landry My heat gun has 2 temperatures, 700 and 1000. I only use the low setting.One of these days I will pick up a thermocouple so I can measure the actual temperature on the chip.This computer has been out of service so long that there are 119 windows updates, which are being applied right now. I plan to fire this thing up daily, and run some games on it to drive up the chip temperature and see how long it lasts.It isn't a really fast machine, only scored 4.1 on the windows performance scale.By comparison the laptop I replaced it with comes in at 5.2, and my desktop I edit on is a 7.7
+Darryl Landry I did a second reheat with flux under the chips. The initial camera shoot was a short blast to see if it would bring the computer back to life. I heated the chips for about 30 seconds on the second go around to make sure that the solder flowed completely. Time will tell if I got it.
Hi Dave; I have a question, when you work with smd's and a small capacitor goes bad and must be replaced, how can you tell what value it is since there are no markings on it.
+Bill B That's an excellent question that I don't have an answer for because you already answered it yourself. You can't tell if there are no markings, other than from the schematic or parts list.
As you said: another laptop saved.. well, i have a dell laptop that also suddenly stopped working. so i really wanna know how to determine weather the problem is a GPI chip or not. please, tell me the procedure to check that out and how you knew it was the GPU which failed . :)
+Osamah Najjar Well, if the laptop makes the right sounds on booting (fan kicking on, cd drive cycle,... you get to know the boot sounds after a while), but there's nothing on the screen, you sort of got a direction to go on.
+pedro esteva I don't have any more broken ones at this point, and I normally don't work on them. Plus when people call me an idiot, it makes me wonder why I even bother at all.
hi there! question......I have this same computer and i wanted to see if you might be able to help me out with suggestions. Its sporadically powering up. Do you think this might work? The power supply went out on it years ago, so i just used it with the AC power, and worked fine for a while. Now, it only randomly powers up. The power light usually comes on for about 5 seconds, heard is whirring like it wants to power up.....then the light goes off. 1 out of 20 times it would completely power up and everything was fine until the until went into sleep mode, then i run into the problem again. Now, sadly, I am not even hearing the whirring like it wants to power up, and im freaking out. Ive tried severl times like I explained above, and nothing. I thought you might be able to give some insight. I would take it somewhere, but im unfortunately unemployed at the moment, and cannot. This computer has my resume and i desperatly need it! Thanks for reading, and sorry for the novel ;)
This is how mine started acting up. After reflowing the GPU it has been fine, and even though it Is not my main computer these days. I still do use it when I travel to back up my photos and video to my external drive. Just used it last month, and all is still fine, except the battery which won't hold a charge anymore, but that is expected as batteries do wear out.
It happens to me when the HDD had corrupted by the cheapo Seagate 500 GB Hard Drive, when it was used for Windows 7, after for about 3 months later, it corrupted and can't format to NTFS which use as RAW format and can't get it to work right, and sadly they're made in China. =(
+Dmitriy Sitnikov Well that's not happening. It is my old laptop, it is not a high end one, and it has already been replaced so getting it working at no cost is a bonus, as I had pulled the hard drive and had planned to toss it. Now I can use it for basic Web browsing. Many others are in the same boat. They would like to get an old machine up to get files off, but have no intention of paying someone to fix it. You might not agree, but as they say opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.
