I was given a laptop that is old and didn't seem to work. It would light up when plugged in, but system wouldn't beep or anything so I figured it was a bad motherboard. After gathering the beanZ to crack it open, I was stumped by the design and checked with Compaq's website for a service manual. The helpful support rep sent me the wrong document, but it was close enough to help me find another document that was almost like the one I had torn apart.

Reseating the processor and memory did not seem to work. I pulled the floppy disk drive and noticed some corrosion around a few soldered contacts. The chip with most of the funk is probably for video. It looks like somehow some liquid got underneath the floppy drive and caused shorting and corrosion of these circuits.

I grabbed a sock to wipe off some crust, but it didn't help much. Then I got the bright idea of using a thumbtack to scrape off some crust so that the tiny solder connections didn't short together. Luckily, I had seen my old trusty magnifying glass in a box of junk recently. With enough light and a little patience, I scraped on the circuits for a few minutes.

After reassembling the laptop, it refused to boot just like before. As I was sitting there thinking about the value of the individual components, I cut the power and then turned it back on (still not sure why). To my suprise, the video flickered and it booted right up just fine and without errors!

Blazing speed and enormous storage were science fiction when this ironclad was forged, but I was tickled pink when all 32MB and Windows 98 said hello. 2 Gig hard drive! Office '97! does it get any better? hehe

Unfortunately, my wireless network card does't work in the unit so I really don't have much use for it, but I just had to share that trick with the thumbtack. And to think, it was diagnosed as a "bad motherboard" !

 

 

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