Hardware repairs

I’ve been tinkering with my computers ever since the days of ZX Spectrum, more or less. In the last eight years or so, however, people would come to me with their broken laptops and computers every now and then. It didn’t happen too often to become a nuisance; instead, it was a welcome distraction from my regular daily tasks (with the exception, maybe, of the time when I had seven laptops at my office at once 🙂 ).

The repairs I had to make varied greatly. Sometimes it was as easy as replacing a broken fan, sometimes you had to gut the whole laptop, even taking the motherboard out, to get to the fan at the bottom of the chassis. More often than not, the issue was a failing hard drive, which was easy to replace and, unless the data was too corrupt, even to recover (lots of thanks to ddrescue  for all the hard work). Other times, it was a failing power supply unit, overheating issue, broken LCD screen, etc. For a couple of laptops, the problem was a malfunctioning motherboard the price of which was too high to make the repair at all. And there was even one case of a desktop which burnt down completely, power supply, mother board, hard drive, just everything.

Anyway, I have been taking pictures of the machines that came and went, just for the record, and now I thought it would perhaps make a nice gallery. So here it is: