lol xbox towel reflow

Posted at 10:30 am on May 31st, 2009 by F7

I’ve heard of taking keyboards with coke (“soda pop”) spilled on them and running them through washing machines, I’ve also heard of doing it with motherboards and some other stuff. Somebody said they used to take a bunch of motherboards and run them through the dishwasher at the same time and half of them would make it, half of them wouldn’t.

Posted at 10:33 am on May 31st, 2009 by Shane

What about freezing dead hard drives so you can get data off of them? You get about 10 or 15 minutes tops between freezer trips so you have to be quick.

That trick has made me so much cash…

Posted at 10:44 am on May 31st, 2009 by Phil

when my laptop drive was in the process of disintegrating, it would only function if I opened the laptop up 180 degrees and propped the whole thing up vertically…

Posted at 10:45 am on May 31st, 2009 by nancy

Well I would think electronics can get wet as long as you do not turn them on till they are 100% dry?

Posted at 10:45 am on May 31st, 2009 by epicelite

@epicelite

And wipe out every particle. You meaby can dry out a pcb, but if the water has suspended minerals, that could be a problem even if you dry everything up.

Posted at 10:59 am on May 31st, 2009 by Reikaze

I had to deal with an upside-down Playstation too. I think it was actually a design flaw in the first generation, the heating vents were at the bottom so it was very easy to put it on a surface (like carpet) which kept those vents from doing their job.

Posted at 11:04 am on May 31st, 2009 by nihilocrat

I tried the same thing with a Thinkpad motherboard as a last ditch attempt (based on some forum suggestion) and it worked.

I’ve also used a dishwasher to clean up motherboards and graphics cards which have suffered leaky capacitors; it works well, you just have to make sure the item is bone dry before you power it up again!

The upside down PlayStation is well documented – the problem was caused by excess heat warping the plastic rails that the laser pickup moves on, the solution just uses gravity to counteract the increased friction :)

Posted at 11:09 am on May 31st, 2009 by tom

Dropped faulty Amiga 500 from about 2 ft to reseat ics. Used to save me taking the thing apart.

Posted at 11:11 am on May 31st, 2009 by foh

I spilt port into an amp once. It fried one of the speakers but the amp was fine (I took it apart, wiped it clean and let it dry).

Posted at 11:22 am on May 31st, 2009 by Tim

I have several classic Gameboys which I use to write music and they tend to lose columns of pixels (lots of columns) so I applied lots of heat with a soldering iron to the ribbon connecting the vertical part of the matrix with the glass for about ten minutes and amazingly, no more dead pixels at all!

Posted at 11:24 am on May 31st, 2009 by Rolf Stenström

i actually used the towel trick on my laptop to fix my crappy integrated nvidia card. just wrap it up and run a cpu stress test. it got up to 94C! totally works though.

Posted at 11:24 am on May 31st, 2009 by idiot

the freezer trick saved me a few hard drives as well.

on my old PC, the hard drive needle would stick on occasion, and by lifting the front end up about 2 inches and dropping it, it would mysteriously work.

Posted at 11:27 am on May 31st, 2009 by Winphreak

its weird no components fell off while he was reflowing it

Posted at 11:39 am on May 31st, 2009 by rasz

I’ve used similar methods to repair ball grid arrays on xbox 360s and the newer dlp, lcd, and plasma television. Though I usually place the chip I want to reset facing up. Then after a minute of heat I put a small weight on the chip. After another minute remove the heat, but leave the weight. Only thing you have to worry about is accidentally shifting the chip while the solder is hot.

I’ve had mouse infested projection televisions that I had to use a mild pressure wash on before they could be repaired.

Electronics and water get along fine. So long as the water and contaminants are gone before electricity shows up. Also have to remember that some capacitors keep a charge and could short out when water is applied.

@rasz
For surface mount parts as long as they are not heavy and the board isn’t bumped the solder will hold the part like glue.

Posted at 11:53 am on May 31st, 2009 by MKnight

@ Rasz: Lightweight parts, and not breaking the surface tension, as well as not completely reflowing the solder (Just enough to fix connections, but not complete liquidity)

Posted at 12:43 pm on May 31st, 2009 by cde

@rasz
also, frequently smd element on the bottom side are glued to the board, as well as soldered.

Posted at 12:47 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Rado

I was fishing something out of my keyboard w/ a knife and sliced a connection (brilliant, I know). My solution was to tape a paper clip across break. Still works like a charm.

Paper clips actually work great for all sorts of repairs. I used a bunch of paper clips to wire up an ancient keyboard connector so that it would work in a PS/2 port.

Posted at 1:06 pm on May 31st, 2009 by dan

I’m sure that everyone remembers the HP monitors with a loose solder connection, where the fix described in the manual was ‘percussive maintenance’. Then there’s the Creative Zen’s HDD sticktion problems, fixed with a good hard whack to the side of the player.

Posted at 1:08 pm on May 31st, 2009 by EdZ

Ditto on the upside-down play station.

Posted at 1:18 pm on May 31st, 2009 by J.R.

The Xbox 360 towel trick totally works. I got RROD a few years ago so I tried the towel repair because of a video I saw on Youtube, then managed to get in about 45 minutes of Guitar Hero 2 before it died again.

Posted at 1:19 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Gage

I’ve got a crappy laptop that the screen keep going out. Maybe I should try the towel treatment.

Posted at 1:20 pm on May 31st, 2009 by J.R.

i don’t know if this is considered crazy, but a few cordless phones i had lost response on the keypad, and cleaning the oil of the contacts with some alcohol made them work again. and there is also the rubber eraser trick where you clean the pc card contacts and memory module contacts with it, and they are magically working again.

Posted at 1:26 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Roee

@cde: yeah, I never underestimate the surface tension of molten solder :)

@epicelite: you want to get the water away from the device pronto, or it can do plenty of corrosion damage (these accidents rarely happen with deionised water :S) Also water droplets can be trapped in lots of places long after you think it’s completely dry.

Dumping the device into a container of methylated spirits as soon as possible will do the trick – it will flush the water away nicely as well as evaporate quickly and completely.

Posted at 1:49 pm on May 31st, 2009 by pelrun

The pencil eraser thing got me a fluke multimeter for nothing (someone gave it to me cause it didn’t work after it’d been dropped in a puddle)

Posted at 1:50 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Del

I’ve repaired 2 ipods that had the bad hard drive icons. both required removal of the hard drive, then a good shaking. I know it’s nonsense, but the shaking didn’t fix it while installed in the ipod. You had to remove it.

Posted at 1:50 pm on May 31st, 2009 by calebkraft

oO

Posted at 1:57 pm on May 31st, 2009 by hatschi

I built me a usb drive cradle INSIDE the freezer. It worked.

Posted at 2:15 pm on May 31st, 2009 by spiritplumber

Seen and played with one ps1 that worked only upside down. Top-side up, it just didnt detect the disc..

Posted at 2:47 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Jani Mikkonen

spiritplumber, that’s genious! I wonder how long till someone comes up with a miniature freezer purposely designed with a 3.5″ / 2.5″ / 1.8″ bay inside :)

@foh: yeah many years ago when I was at school we had BBC Micros to play on and the computer guy said yeah the chips can get loose whilst in transport so you drop them flat down onto a hard surface to re-mount the IC’s.

Last year I picked up lots of dirt cheap (3 for £5) things from a car boot seller (like a flea market) which were shop returns from an expensive electronics store called Maplin. Most of the things worked without need of repair, except a 3x AA battery soldering iron that needed a battery contact bent back into shape, which I then proceeded to use to fix a portable laser spirograph thing, dry joint on the laser diode :D

Posted at 2:51 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Haku

i had a computer that would only turn on if the case was on it’s side. once it was on, i could put it back upright, but next time i had to powercycle, over it had to go. in the end i just kept it sideways. worked for 5 years or so before it finally gave up the ghost.

Posted at 3:09 pm on May 31st, 2009 by yossi

Here’s a fun one: freezing the HTC Touch fixes most of its problems.

Posted at 3:18 pm on May 31st, 2009 by mudtub

I have had several instances requiring freezing of harddrives. works like a charm.

I still have my PS1 that requires it to be upside down to work, if it works.

I used to work at a TV repair shop, and the vast majority of what we fixed were mitsubishi electric’s V26 chassis DLPs (the WD**525, WD**625, and WD**825 models) which were almost entirely capacitor replacement jobs. what we’d often see is several capacitors in series or parallel in the power supplies from one of the other (less professional) shops not having the right parts and just slapping something together to get the tv to “work” needless to say, it didn’t stick too well. some of them were even just taped to the pads with some electrical tape, too.

we’ve come across the xbox 360 fixes a few times, and they’re kinda hit and miss.

there’ve been a few instances where I’ve had to reflow solder in my oven before, on a thinkpad A30, I’ve fixed the gpu with that, and I’ve also used a mechanical pencil to repair a couple micro fractures in the same laptop’s mainboard.

Posted at 3:20 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Aadon

I once used a cat whisker to repaint broken traces on a video card with silver fluid.

Posted at 3:30 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Josh Enders

@nihilocat Yeah, unfortunately heat dissipation and laser decay were common for its later generations too.

Posted at 3:32 pm on May 31st, 2009 by blizzarddemon

I read data off a bad laptop drive by freezing it, and while reading the data off, submersed it in ice water (inside a ziplock).

Held out long enough to get everything off.

Posted at 3:32 pm on May 31st, 2009 by RyanE

You can use a dollar bill to clean contacts on pci cards and what not

Posted at 3:39 pm on May 31st, 2009 by collinstheclown

hi all. i have also used the heater trick, but in my case i used the thick thermal pad from a cracked plasma display panel to act as a heat spreader for the underside of the PCB (which i then placed on a spare CDROM drive). insulated the capacitors and connector with tinfoil then did the reflow with a heat gun. So far the repaired (AGP) Nvidia card hasn’t failed yet.

regards, A

Posted at 4:01 pm on May 31st, 2009 by andre

Popped my camera in the oven, because it was wet.

Posted at 4:09 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Dan Gleesack

On eof our clients back in the day were a large accounting firm, One of their hard drives failed containing quite a bit of critical data. This was an RLL drive and after inspection we found that the mainm spindle had failed. So out with a drill and speed controller. Firstly we drilled and tapped the centre of the spindle then using a flexishaft connected the drill and speed controller. using DOS we continued to DIR the drive until we started to see listings then pulled al the data off. Was 100% successfull in the recovery process.

Posted at 4:13 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Andrew Hooper

Deionized water is the only way to clean electronics.

Posted at 4:47 pm on May 31st, 2009 by BigD145

Andrew Hooper: *Applause* Well played =)

Posted at 5:39 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Pilotgeek

When in doubt – duck it!

Posted at 5:40 pm on May 31st, 2009 by bfo

I’ve done a lot of “dishwasher” repairs before. I normally follow up the dishwasher repair with a bath of the commercially available WD40. Before I sound like an advertisement, it seems to be the only “oil” that doesn’t eat at most plastics, and after it dries it doesn’t leave any conductive chemicals behind. I’ve used WD40 and an old tooth brush to clean up dirt, smoke, etc. from microwave transmitters and receivers without causing a need to re-tune (unless I jiggled an adjustment by accident). When I used to repair VCR’s that the gears would keep going out of alignment, I would take apart the mode switch and pack it with white lithium grease. I’ve used white lithium grease to make intermittent switches work, and have had limited success with resistive volume controls.

Posted at 6:20 pm on May 31st, 2009 by jammit

@ Gage

I had the same experience with the towel trick, 30 minutes upside down in a towel and it would work for an hour or so. I kept doing that for a while but eventually just tried the wedge-under-the-ram-chips trick which kept it going for about 6 months before it got hit with the banhammer.

Posted at 6:40 pm on May 31st, 2009 by Wolf

My Xbox 360 wireless control stopped working so i took it apart to what’s inside, Not a electronics guru or anything of that nature, I checked out the board and then thought the vibe motors were cool so i removed them. I put it back together and the SOB worked.

Posted at 6:49 pm on May 31st, 2009 by wwcnd

The towel method for a xbox is probably the worst way of doing. Whoever thought of the idea, never thought of thermal runaway. In most cases, the bga ic needs to be reflowed, and even though you might reflow it with the towel method, the thermal damage could have destroyed other parts of the board even though the bga has been reflowed. lol

Posted at 7:04 pm on May 31st, 2009 by EFOX

I had an old iPod mini that would only play music if you squeezed the top and bottom, flexing the entire circuit board. By the time I finally got a new one, it would only work in a small hand-vise.

Posted at 7:05 pm on May 31st, 2009 by daniel

Hah, I have never owned a Playstation that didn’t need to be upside down.

My first liked to run on the left side at 10-30° from vertical.

It is the laser sled rails made from plastic that wear out and cause misalignment of the laser.

RE wet electronics: try a putting them bowl of dry rice, the rice will absorb the moisture.

Posted at 7:09 pm on May 31st, 2009 by nubie

@ efox

that may be true, but it was broke before. The worse thing is that it would be broke after as well.

Posted at 7:24 pm on May 31st, 2009 by darkofpeace

My sister has a laptop which was random rebooting.
After a full hour inspecting the motherboard circuitry, I found a detached SMD resistor.
I simply soldered it again into place.

I doubt putting the motherboard inside the oven would work because the SMD resistor was actually a little out of its place.

Posted at 7:28 pm on May 31st, 2009 by MAX

my 360 gave me the whole red rings o death, i punted that pos a couple of feet(no longer covered in warranty) gave it a good ol pimp hand slappin, pushed on, and it came to life again. strange thing is it never did it again. but now i know about the towel thing, i might do that next in conjunction with my pimp hand technique.

Posted at 7:42 pm on May 31st, 2009 by nick

lulz at all you thinking that a towel will reflow the solder on a 360

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solder

Posted at 7:54 pm on May 31st, 2009 by anon

@EFOX I mostly agree, apart from the reflow bit
when a 360 is ‘fixed’ with the towel method, it doesn’t reach above 100C before the thermal protection of the 360 kicks in. 100c is no where near enough to re-flow solder, which melts at above 250c.
all its really doing is creating enough flex to re join the pads for a while. and creating more damage to the components. the towel fix rarely lasts more than a few hours of playing.
a better way is to wrap up all the capacitors in some heat insulator (to stop them from overheating) and put the motherboard in the oven. or use a heatgun concentrated on the gpu area.
thats a tried and true method, thousands of 360’s have been fixed with it.

Posted at 8:03 pm on May 31st, 2009 by jt

Back in the day, we had an electronics lab full of 286s with hard drives that would stick on boot up. A 1″ hole in the side of the case allowed a well timed whack to the HD with a nut driver. This kept us going for over a year until the school could replace the machines.

Posted at 8:29 pm on May 31st, 2009 by greenyooper

If you have a 4th gen iPod with a sad face, take the back off and put half of a business card folded in two between the case and the hard drive. Also clean the contacts of the ribbon cable with an eraser. Works on almost all of the iPods I have tried (except the one dropped out of a 4 story window).

Find some like this on craigslist for $20, fix and sell for $50.

Posted at 10:58 pm on May 31st, 2009 by BananaPhuc

Also, I once had to dive for an iPod nano 3rd gen in a lake, it was about 15 feet down. After 20 minutes of looking, I find it, open it up, dry it out with a hair dryer and sock, waited a day, plugged it in, and it worked fine.

Posted at 11:03 pm on May 31st, 2009 by BananaPhuc

people who mindlessly throw away supposedly “broken” electronics will fuel my beer fund forever

Posted at 11:32 pm on May 31st, 2009 by octelcogopod

circuit boards are often rinsed with water during manufacturing to remove flux residues. i have cleaned several motherboards with the garden hose followed by a rinse in distilled water and a few days in a warm place to dry off. i suspect the reason half the motherboards don’t make it through the dishwasher is that they were broken in some way that washing couldn’t fix. the dishwasher is also pretty aggressive.

Posted at 12:15 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by bhartley

several years ago i got a really nice playstation 2 controller. it had macros buttons, rubberized grip and was pretty big which fits my hands nicely (i can’t use mini controllers). anyway we had kittens at the time and they chewed the cords. I plugged in the controller and it would sorta work. I finally found that it would work perfectly if the cord was bent at a sharp angle and then held along the side of the controller. A half role of electrical tape later and it still works today :) of course now the cord comes out the bottom of the left side of the controller. i could porbably open it up and fix it but i mostly just play my 360 and wii

Posted at 2:13 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by christopher

btw nick show that 360 whos the boss!!! its amazing how often electronics responds to physical violence. i used to regularly smack computers that didn’t work. most even seem to respond to verbal threats lol

Posted at 2:17 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by christopher

old school but still worked. blowing on NES carts and or licking the contacts of said carts always did the trick.

Posted at 2:33 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Daniel

I know a guy who repairs iBooks by putting flaming gas on it (on the GPU actually) and people pay for it! XD

Posted at 2:43 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Finder

I once took my broken phone to a certain UK high-street phone retailer and they told me it was “beoynd economic repair” as it was “water damaged” after about a 2-hour wait.

I walked out of the shop, turned it on and it worked. They really do know f**k all. I’m sure it was all about having phone insurance. bloody cowboys.

Posted at 3:27 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by mig

@christopher

I like to call it percussive maintenance.

Posted at 4:17 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by antipode

I rember having a quantum “bigfoot” drive that was failing and we used a bag of frozen peas to keep it cool enough to recover the data from it….

Posted at 4:38 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by DeathsPal

Sony DSC-series digital cameras are reknowned for the “E61-turn power off and on again” error, which is usually down to the lens cover gears getting crunged up. They are tiny, plastic, and driven by a tiny motor producing bugger all torque – the slightest bit of dust in the gearing causes them to jam.

A common fix for this is “turn it off, slap the hell out of the camera, then turn it on again”.

This works, but is liable to bugger up the focus and zoom motors – a better solution is to take the front case off, remove the lens cover assembly entirely, short the “cover open” sensor, and put it all back together. The lens cover can be replaced by gluing part of a 35mm film canister to the front of the camera, and using the canister lid to seal the lens assembly when the camera’s not in use.

I bought 2 busted DSC-600s for 15€ total including shipping from fleabay, fixed them this way, and use them as “disposable” cameras for snowboarding, rockclimbing and other “hazardous” activities. I had one of them taped onto the top of my ice hockey helmet for a match once…

Posted at 4:53 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Mr Poo

@calebkraft: +2 on shaking/banging ipod HD while out of case to get it to work again.

Posted at 4:57 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Liam

The freezer trick on hard drives works longer if you wrap the hard drive in a “cold sleeve” for medical uses. It’s basically a cold gel pack you freeze.

I can get 30 minutes that way.

I had a laptop that you had to spin when you powered it up to get the drive to spin up. I also had to open it every 6 months to put a drop of silicone oil on the center of the HDD spindle shaft.

20 meg laptop hard drives were not only rare then but insane priced Plus I refusedto go back to using the 2 inch” special floppys it had.

Zenith minisports were cool as hell, but man they were a PITA in special parts. I was lucky and sent a Minisport HD with the Massive 20 meg hard drive accidentially instead of the Minisport I bought. I kept quiet :->

Posted at 5:28 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by fartface

@octelcogopod i feel ay

i like to think im the lcd king

27/30 fixed with old shit layin around the house :)

Posted at 5:40 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by rotceh_dnih

I fixed an old Creative Zen mp3 player with a stuck hard drive and a loose audio jack. I disassembled the whole thing, removed the hard drive, and slammed it as hard as I could against a desk. BAM! Fixed. As for the audio jack, I folded a thick square of paper up and propped it between the interior of the jack and some metal casing on the inside. When the battery stopped holding a charge, I gave up on the piece of garbage and got a SanDisk Sansa.

Posted at 5:53 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Tom133t

A few weeks ago my friend bought a new CPU for his 775 socket. after he put it in and it didn’t work he brought it to me. it turned out to be DOA, but when he put his other CPU back in it didn’t work either. long story short i found out he was missing a pin on the socket. I managed to fix it by making a new pin out of a piece of stripped twisty tie from a loaf of bread. The funny part was, he said it worked better than it ever had before. (ran 20c cooler)

Posted at 6:41 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by McSquid

I put my xbox360 in the oven after applying pennies to the motherboard to fix the shoddy factory heat sinks. I to this day haven’t seen a red ring.

I have also used rice on phones that have been submerged in water. I’ve had pretty good success with that. As long as voltage was not applied to the phone while it was wet, it seems to do well.

Posted at 6:48 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by moshguy

Back in the day, my family used to have a VCR with some slightly broken mechanical components. It played tapes just fine but would eject them immediately if the tape wasn’t pressed down manually while inside. Fortunately we had a hatchet just small (and heavy) enough to fit inside the opening and rest on top of the tape. So every time we watched a tape we had to put the hatchet inside the VCR to press the tape down. It worked for years!

Posted at 6:48 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Justin

Hmmm. An nVidia casserole. Interesting. That’s even better than fixing a speaker with rubber cement.

Posted at 7:00 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Shawn

smart ace

Posted at 7:11 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by subtlenserious

I’m surprised the caps didn’t pop or the power connector didn’t melt… [for the vid card that this article is about]

Posted at 7:21 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Andrew

The old Rio Riots seemed to have a regular problem where the HDD would stick, which required you to crack it against the edge of a table in an exact spot at an exact angle to fix.

Surprisingly the HDD kept going longer than the screen which ended up ‘barcoded’ after a year.

Ghetto solutions to technical problems are the best. My first laptop was a bag of crap that I had to hold together with duct tape, smack the keyboard in *just* the right place to get it to boot, wiggle the power adaptor until it was at an exact angle for it to charge and all sorts.

Posted at 7:26 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Nicholas Smith

I know there’s so many posts already that nobody will get a chance to read this. I had to test a rs232 port on a computer in the field, so to create a loop back connection, I bent up a small paperclip and cut two small bits off an ink pen’s ink tube and used those to couple the paperclip to the serial pins.

also, I had a crt that would show screwy colors randomly, but a good punch to the glass sorted everything out.

Posted at 7:31 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Skitchin

TV Remotes are the worst offenders when it comes to liquids being spilled on them (Mr Beer, I’m looking at you!). Open it up, get some washing up liquid and using a combination of a toothbrush and a washing up sponge, give the whole thing a good clean – don’t forget to give the button contacts on the PCB a good scrub! Rinse well in running warm water and use a hair-dryer to dry out all components. Get the PCB to a good temperature so be sure all moisture has been evaporated.

Put it back together and job done!

Washing up liquid and a hairdryer are a repairman’s best friend!

Posted at 7:34 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Marty

I worked at an electronic salvage yard, I used to rob really dead motherboards of their capacitors and verify they were still good with a cap tester and fix other boards that just needed new caps on the voltage regulation circuit etc… (around processor.) Worked like a charm 90% of the time. (after a 24 hour burn in they still functioned correctly.)

Posted at 8:08 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by modembug

When I worked in a data center we had one machine that never worked right. It was a 4U rackmount, and when you actually mounted it in the rack, it wouldn’t turn on. If you unmounted it and put it on its side, it would work perfectly. We changed out EVERYTHING on that machine. Powersupply, board, proc, rewired it, even changed the damn case. Tried different racks even. Nothing. As far as I know they ended up upgrading the guy to a Dell server just so we could get the space back on the rack.

Posted at 8:13 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Dan

A few years ago I had a motherboard that would only work when not screwed into a case. This motherboard was my best mb at the time, so it just sat on a wooden block and would do it’s thing.

I had a laptop that had a crappy video to video card interface and would periodically loosen the connector ribbon. So I would take it apart (the whole thing had to come apart), pull out the connector ribbon, and then reconnect it.

I have a desktop that I currently run, that for some reason will only work with a CDROM connected to the first IDE port as a master. Otherwise none of the other hard drives are recognized.

Posted at 8:31 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by protocron

i’m not a spec in electronics, but i have one good job done.
when the 300mAh battery of my old mp3 player died, i changed it to 5800mAh and everything worked.
now the player looks like crap, but can play music for 5 to 6 days non-stop.

Posted at 8:32 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by peer

Towel trick for the 360 is worthless. You are doing more damage than good. You only want to heat the parts that need repair (usually CPU/GPU). The towel trick heats EVERYTHING and can severely damage other unintended parts. The best solution is to take the thing apart and heat the CPU/GPU only by removing the fan and letting it overheat (just until the overheat error shows up). As long as you replaced the xclamps and have even pressure on the dies, 9 times out of 10 it worked. I had a box that worked for over two years before it completely went bad on me using that method.

Posted at 8:53 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Decepticon

I once had a desktop that wouldn’t pull power right and the motherboard had leaked capacitors on it. I could get it to run by switching the voltage on the PS while powering on, it was a bit of a hassle but it gave me six more months.

Posted at 9:06 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by mosiac

I worked for a small startup doing touchup&clip and QC eons ago, and until their order for dedicated board washing machines came in, we had a row of half a dozen dishwashers.Bye-bye mister flux and all that sickening pink masking, no problem.

Posted at 9:37 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by obsoehollerith

When I worked support for a desktop manufacturer years ago, we would tell people on the phone to pick their PC up two inches and then drop it. This was called a ‘Technical Drop’.

Posted at 10:06 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by bearsinthesea

@Skitchin: haha that reminds me of the time I hit a CRT monitor so hard it needed to run its degaussing function to get the colours back to normal!

When I got my first Amiga, a 1500, I needed a 25-way D connection cable for an external SCSI drive, couldn’t afford the extorionate price of a shop-bought cable so I found out the pinout of SCSI 50-way connectors and proceeded to make my own by stripping the necessary 25 individual wires of a SCSI 50-way ribbon cable and soldering them to a 25-way D plug. Worked like a charm first time and lasted for many years.

The lithium-polymer battery in my Archos AV500 wouldn’t hold *any* charge, so recently I took one of the lithium-polymer batteries from my iRiver H140 spares (once bought several dead ones to make a few good ones) and swapped the battery over, soldered just the battery into the dead batterys charge control circuit. It lives again! and saved me a pile of money :)
Weirdly one of the faulty iRiver H140 motherboards would only work when it was upside, turn it over or shake it and the thing would freeze (music stopped, LCD screen not changing) until it was reset – never did figure out how to fix that despite many attempts.

BTW, keep the replies flooding in, I’m thoroughly enjoying reading everone’s problem solving anecdotes :)

Posted at 10:38 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by Haku

broken ribbon cable.
punched 2 little holes with a needle and run through tiny copper wires held in place with tape to bypass the interruption.
now my old vaio’s only usb port works again.

Posted at 10:43 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by pod

forgot to mention i also reflown the audio jack putting the board in the oven to repair it, as the guy in the arcticle did.

Posted at 10:45 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by pod

@Nick
Show that xBox who’s boss, don’t let it quit on you like that.

My dad’s old phone dropped to the bottom of a 12 foot pool when he was cleaning it. He let it dry for 2 days and it worked. A few months later, the same phone went through the washing machine, and all it needed then was a new battery.

There was a 15″ LCD by the dumpster at work, the thing wasn’t powering on. Took it home with me and stripped the power button out, tapped the bare wires together and BAM! green light and video.

I’ve also used hot glue when I was too lazy to solder.

Posted at 11:00 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by HomerGonerson

Acetone is most usefull to drive moisture and water away form pcb. It is safe for pcb and all SMD components, but be careful, it will fog clear plastics, and will eat many other. Just spill some on to the pcb, brush away with toothbrush, repeat several times, and then shake excess acetone away. Acetone evaporates easy, and an hair-dryer can make pcb workable in 30 minutes. Don’t overheat pcb, if you can touch it with the fingers and keep your fingers on it it is hot enough.

I have been using an hair-dryer to heat PC pcbs enough to be able to unsolder leaked capacitors with wimpy 20W soldering iron. I have replaced leaked capacitors on more than 30 PC main boards with 100% sucess.

@modembug
You can test capacitors without expensive cap tester. Just measure the leakage current at voltage close to rated. An variable voltage power supply, an resistor and an voltmeter is all you need. My PC uses an motherboard more than 8 years old with fifth set of capacitors around CPU.

Posted at 11:14 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by space

Oh I know. A power outage killed one of my servers. It killed one of the drives, and the power supply. Unfortunetly I didn’t have a power supply that was rated high enough for the server. With 4 drives it need 350+ watts. So I used two 300 watt power supplies and it worked. Two drives on one, two on the other and the system.
It was a little tricky to get it to start, but it worked for 5 months or so.
My network printer locks up occasionally. Usually a reboot will reinitialize it enough to get it to print.

Posted at 11:30 am on Jun 1st, 2009 by protocron

I had a hard drive that stopped spinning up. I turned it on its side, and it ran like that just fine for a couple weeks, enough time to copy everything off. Then it made a horrible noise and died.

Posted at 12:22 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by M Sherman

my laptop’s cooling fan was making noise so i took out the big copper heatsink it was attached to and cleaned it off as i was putting it back in the laptop i realized it wasn’t making contact with the embedded gpu so i folded up a piece of aluminum foil and stuck it in there

Posted at 12:51 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by foiled

My Acer aspire has a loose screw securing the power switch. The switch itself is amazingly convenient as a key chain, and oddly that’s what I use it for when it’s not in the computer.

Posted at 1:45 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by songndance

I don’t have a particular fix – but I work at a company that does repairs on motherboards, printers, screens etc. We use a bga reflow machine (I’m sure it was a pretty penny) for replacing / reconnecting chips.

Also – to chime in with the water comment – we use water on just about all circuit board cleanings. We use distilled water that is run through a steamer machine and we actually clean with the steam. No trace elements and it dries pretty quick too. Great for cleaning up spills.

Posted at 2:03 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by Chris

I had the opposite problem: Too good of a soldering job. My wife’s Dell laptop, like most 3-5 year old laptops, had a flaky power connector. Unfortunately, the only soldering iron I could find to replace it with was a decade-old radioshack cheapie. It couldn’t get up enough heat to de-solder the power connector because of its (relatively) thick housing acting as a heat sink.

Eventually I had to resort to play “D.” As in a “Dremel” with a “diamond-tipped cutting blade.” Even then the traces in the board where too thick for four of the pins, and they too had to be dremeled out with a very narrow bore. I have to say the whole idea of taking a dremel to a motherboard didn’t sit well with me at first, but it did actually work, and power cords once again fit snug and secure.

Posted at 2:05 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by Feshy

Please visit.

I need your help.

http://powerintruth.wordpress.com/

Posted at 2:34 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by powerintruth

I once read data off of a hard drive with my naked eye. Then, to get it to spin, i took it into an antarctic blizzard and never let a single snowflake touch it. Didn’t work, of course.

Posted at 3:49 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by hum4n

I fixed the RROD on my 360 with about $6 in bolts and washers from home depot and a solid 20min of overheating, and it’s still running strong.

Posted at 3:54 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by LordSpacehog

fixed a no power V3M RAZR by reflowing the power clock with a lighter!

Posted at 3:55 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by Dave

im still using a 400w soldering iron do desolter the parts which ends up with heavvily destructed pcbs, i usually rebuilt it with a slice of an ata cable, the workflow sucks hard lol
mostly im stuck at buying new things and keeping the old ones for pesonal projects

Posted at 4:05 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by arrangemonk

Long ago I got my first Laserdisc player. it was used, since i was poor. It didn’t play right. it would skip. I discovered that lifting one side of it would make it play correctly. So from that day forth it sat by the TV with a 2×4 under one side.

I have also fixed many a random circuit board with a good scrubbing in the sink with a paint brush and drying using compressed air from my shop compressor.

Posted at 4:41 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by Audin

Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve “fixed” something by banging it on the table.

Posted at 4:57 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by AlmostThere

I had someone I was talking to once with a broken iPod literally drop kick it into a wall. Left a nice dent in the wall, but the iPod worked again. If he was renting, hopefully the security deposit was less than the cost of a new ipod.

Posted at 5:16 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by Thamios

uh now i remembered i have an old HP nx8220 laptop :D that will get turned on only if i lift the right corner like for 5cm and press it in the middle. then it boots, without that it only asks for some strange security card :S even if the SC was turned off in bios :S , since it was out of guarantee and HP repairs cost like 600$-700$ for new system board it never get repaired :D so ill try that owen method :D just in cast it might work! :D

Posted at 6:00 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by bfo

these are crazy cool fixes! freezing a busted drive to get it to work! might try that one.

always found cleaning water logged PCBs (especially on phones and remotes) with acetone [a.k.a. nail polish remover] to be a reliable fix

Posted at 6:20 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by Jerrem

My friend owned a xbox 360 that would only work standing up

a couple months later the xbox broke so we towled it, got 15 minutes of play then it froze, rebooted got 10 minutes, rebooted again and got about 3-4, then it wouldn’t even boot

Posted at 7:07 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by A_Blind_Man

My fix for remote controls (whether they’re sticky, dirty, or just “not working”) is a thorough cleaning. First I completely disassemble them, wash the plastic and silicone bits with dish soap and a toothbrush, and (only if needed) wash and thoroughly rinse off the circuit board. Blow it all dry with a hair dryer. I check the button holes to make sure that they’re unobstructed, and use a sharp pointed knife to carefully cut away any damaged/deformed plastic that obstructs the holes (or the leather punch on my Swiss army knife.)

If the battery contacts are corroded, I scrape, file, or shine them with ultra fine (400 grit) sandpaper, and if possible I gently bend the centers of the contacts to make better contact with the battery terminals.

Once it’s dry, I take a fresh pink pencil eraser and shine up the little copper mazes on the circuit board that the buttons touch (old, hard, or dirty erasers are trouble.) Clean the rubber from the board with a dry brush or cloth. I then take the silicone sheet with all the buttons, and one by one hold the buttons so they stick out below the others, then lightly rub their contact area perpendicularly across a dollar bill held flat upon a table. Think of it as “sanding” the button contacts using the dollar bill as sandpaper. Don’t take more than a swipe or two, you are just breaking through the layer of filth. You don’t have to remove much material. Be very careful not to grind the buttons crooked or they won’t make contact (the fix is to carefully resand them perpendicular.)

Reassemble all the components, put in fresh batteries, et voila!

Yes, it takes about an hour, but they always work like new when I’m done with them, and the fix is permanent (until the next spill.)

Posted at 8:34 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by jaded

I got caught in a blizzard with a Motorola pager once – killed the pager. Too much moisture and cold. I disassembled it, let it dry and warm up, and it came back to life…

I’ve also “fixed” keyboards with liquids spilled in them. Don’t tell my wife/kids, but it just takes disassembly, rinsing with warm water and letting them dry. They think I’m a genius.

Also seen brand new PCBs with a layout error, +5 shorted to ground. No idea where though… We put a 30A supply on a bare board and looked for the flashbulb effect. Then we went and cut the shorted trace on the rest of the boards. They worked.

Posted at 8:49 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by phil

i used to take apart my (worn-out, abused) nes and snes controllers and clean the membranes and buttons in hot soapy water and wipe the button contacts with pen eraser then rinse and dry.

it really, really brought those old things back to life when so i could wreck them some more. damn kids…

Posted at 9:31 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by Dan Fruzzetti

I had a friend that completely nuked his 2GB USB stick at college. He’d had it plugged in to one of the USB ports at the front of the machine situated on the floor.

In a glorious show of absent mindedness he spun on his chair as he was getting up, knocked it with his foot and killed it.

The connector was twisted it what must have been about a 40 degree angle and some of the board was cracked. Needless to say the guy was panicking due to the work that was on there so I took it home to see what I could do.

Basically straightened up the board and taped the thing up tight with electrical tape, desoldered what was left of the original connector, harvested the male end of a USB extension cable, stripped the wires out and soldered them to the board.

Looked ugly as sin but worked long enough to mount it and copy some stuff off it.

After that it never worked again. :P

Posted at 9:37 pm on Jun 1st, 2009 by romulous_prime

I had one hell of a fix with my old iPod – The hard hard drive was dead as far as it was concerned – that was, until I stuck a standard HDD magnet on the back, and it magically worked again!

Only ever worked with the magnet on the back after that, but it gave me an extra 6 months or so of life from the poor thing.

Posted at 5:34 am on Jun 2nd, 2009 by badspyro

I have fixed a flash drive for a teacher at the school that i work at.she had snaped the usb connector of the board and it took some of the stace with it so i used an usb cable from a dead mouse and soldered it to the board and hot glued it into the mouse case (a mac mouse opaque black) works like new and looks great blinking bright blue. i just recently traded a new one for hers and i now have it as usb booting nimblix linux on it.

Posted at 6:09 am on Jun 2nd, 2009 by sheff

I used to work in the maintenance dept. for a hotel. We had constant problems with the cheap tv remotes, where certain buttons would stop working. I got bored one day and disassembled one to see if I could pinpoint the problem. I found that the conductive backing on the buttons were wearing off and leaving a sticky residue on the pcb. A nice clean with rubbing alcohol and most would work again. For the ones that had too much of the conductive backing wear off, I grabbed a hole punch and some aluminum foil and placed the small aluminum circle onto the back of the worn button… On occasion, the foil would stick to the pcb, this was actually kind of funny, I had a guest call and complain that after she turned on the tv, the channels keep scrolling up… (the remotes channel-up button had received the “foil treatment”) This may not be a maintenance-free permanent fix, but by the by the time I left, just about every remote in that hotel had been “serviced” and most of which had received the “foil treatment”. I feel sorry for the poor guy that ended up replacing me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up taking the actual tv’s in for servicing not realizing that it was actually the remote.

Posted at 6:56 am on Jun 2nd, 2009 by torpex505

Haha, great stories guys! Few more randoms from me

When I was maybe 10 I would take apart my NES regularly out of boredom. Apparently though, one time I did something that completely got rid of the loose cartridge error(no more flashy screens)…until I decided to try and take it apart to figure out what I did…that brought it right back.

Had a power pin break off a hard drive at work, so I soldered a wire to the PCB to attach into the back of the power connector.

One of my pc’s hard drives had an IDE pin snap off, so I carefully bent and trimmed a staple and soldered it to the board – I kept using the hard drive for a few more weeks ^_^.

Posted at 7:37 am on Jun 2nd, 2009 by Skitchin

Well I have a laptop that will only work during the warm summer months. During other times it will not want to start. I believe the problem is with the south bridge.

Rubbing alcohol, glue, tape and a soldering iron can solve a lot of problems.

Posted at 7:56 am on Jun 2nd, 2009 by Louis

I have an nVidia card 9800GT that had a poorly lubricated fan. I didn’t have any kind of lubricating grease, but a tootpick loaded up with Carmex lipbalm served the purpose quite nicely. It still runs nice and cool to this day :)

On a different note, I had a power supply that had a cooling fan stop working all of a sudden. I wire-tied an extra fan I had outside the case to keep it limping along for a couple more months.

Posted at 9:27 am on Jun 2nd, 2009 by corster

Just thought of another one. A friend gave me an old Brother HL-10V laser printer. He told me it was perpetually stuck in a paper jam and that he thought it couldn’t be fixed, but I could have it if I wanted it. The paper jam sensor was basically a swing arm which would cover an optical sensor as paper feeds through it. The problem with the design of this specific printer is that the optical sensor sits right on top of the fuser which caused the sensor to darken considerably after time. I just snagged the sensor from the front feeder tray and replaced the old one and now I have a decent document printer which produces thousands of pages on a single toner cartridge.

Posted at 9:33 am on Jun 2nd, 2009 by corster

i once fixed a big screen projection tv by heating up the power supply with a blow drier… who knew?

Posted at 10:44 am on Jun 2nd, 2009 by blackecho

I had a printer they were throwing out at work, that when the lid would shut a plasic piece would go inbetween a sensor that plastic piece broke inside you could here it rattle I knew there was a sensor inside so I got a demmel and cut a square hole in top of the printer and placed a pop sickle stick down in there between the sensor when the lid was closed. when the printer needed to know it was open I removed stick.

Posted at 12:11 pm on Jun 2nd, 2009 by kyle007

I’ve just got mine 8800gts (with problem) from the oven. :D And It’s working now. For little less than 3 minutes and then left it to chill for 30-60 minutes. ;]
Good luck to you all.
Dont wonder to do it or not (You do not have anything to lose if you try :) ).

Posted at 3:10 pm on Jun 2nd, 2009 by happyuser

I have a laptop which Dell reported had a run of bad ‘lid closed’ magnetic reed switches. Diagnostic was listed as putting a small magnet near the switch (outside) and watch for screen flicker.

I didn’t have a ’small’ magnet, I had a hard drive rare earth magnet.

It flickered–problem dx’d…but what to do? I was resigned to cracking the case to replace the switch, when I noticed that every time I put the powerful magnet near the switch, the display stayed on a little longer. I rubbed the magnet over the switch. The display came on and operated (and does to this day) normally.

Posted at 4:24 pm on Jun 2nd, 2009 by jakdedert

Had a $20K logging unit given to me because of a bad display… it only needed the occational whack on the side to get it working. opened it up after it was given to me and had to re-solder a wire. works fine now.

Posted at 11:22 pm on Jun 2nd, 2009 by Black_Angel

I recall having an apple IIe that’d only start up if piledrived into the floor whilst simultaniously pressing the power button.

That was a failed hard disk, but I wonder if the freezer thing could have brought it up for a few minutes too.

Posted at 5:35 am on Jun 3rd, 2009 by lorddef

About 17 years ago I worked for a defence electronics manufacturer here in the UK, building the guidance electronics for a particular laser-guided missile system. After full assembly of the electronics, the nosecone is pumped full of inert gas and sent up to the test room, where an engineer hooks up the connections to the test rig (a BBC Model A Microcomputer, I kid you not), starts the test program, waits for it to fail, then picks the computer up, holds it exactly an inch above the table surface and then drops it before running the test program again, whereupon it would normally pass.

Apparently, nobody had the time to check the Beeb’s I/O connections, or the budget to invest in a new HP test rig (like the rest of the company was using at the time), but the engineering department had plenty of time and resources available to include the process of picking up and dropping the computer in the OFFICIAL test procedure documentation.

Posted at 9:55 am on Jun 3rd, 2009 by Slippy Lane

Oh, and the use of dishwashers (or their industrial equivalent) to clean circuit boards has been common practice in UK electronics manufacturing since the ban on Triklone (1-1-1 Trichloroethane) solvents.
There’s only a few things you need to remember when using a dishwasher on electronics: Remove all batteries, check that all capacitors are discharged, DON’T PUT SALT OR SOAP IN, and remember to take the devices out soon after the wash is complete and dry them either under hot air or with lots of paper towels. Leave devices to air-dry for at least a day before powering them up

Posted at 10:05 am on Jun 3rd, 2009 by Slippy Lane

^FYI… The IIe never had a hard drive…

Posted at 10:18 am on Jun 3rd, 2009 by Hitek146

I had an old CRT television that would often only show a very narrow line of color around the center of the screen. The solution was a well placed punch (or sometimes a kick) to the side of the case. The problem was worse the colder the weather was. It would often take a few tries to get the picture to look right.
On the top of the television was an old style VCR that also required a good whack on the top of the case to get rid of random colors in the picture. This had to be done most delicately though. If I whacked the VCR to hard the vibrations would cause the television to malfunction again :P

Posted at 11:09 am on Jun 3rd, 2009 by mime

Haha, yeah, i’ve had the ol’ Playstation upside down issue with one, and another was fixed by dropping it upside down a couple of feet…was too lazy to open it.

Unfortunately i repaired some 360s “properly” using hot air reworking, modding the clamps, etc. Some by resoldering. Ghetto idea: i know it will likely kill whatever you zap, but why not try zapping a dead card in a microwave for like…a second. Maybe an old one with a mechanical timer, set it on but unplug it. Plug in and quickly unplug. I would SHAT myself with laughter if it worked.

Had many issues with Sony, actually. Mostly so many dead PS2s, usually not the fault of the owner. CD seperates that would work if you lifted them up at the front with a book/VHS tape, PS2s that only worked on their (wrong) side, XBox that worked after i kicked it. Somehow managed to fix a sticking hard drive by freezing it and using a PS2 pad to vibrate it. Well i say fix…more like make it work for a couple of days…’till the motor control chip decided to start the dirty habbit of smoking! :)

I do usually repair things properly, particularly if they’re not mine and i’m fixing something for a friend/family member. Occasionally, i get bored and try something with a dead gadget i have lying around.

Posted at 1:46 pm on Jun 3rd, 2009 by Chaos Husky

I keep ether/hairsparay in the trunk to reseal tires. My Atari 2600 used to require a stiff whack with a book or other heavy object. And my personal favorite the wall wart wired into Hand-helds when out of batteries. When I worked for the army we had 10′000 dollar cards we used to fix with pencil, I kid you not one card had traces almost entirely of graphite before it finally had to be replaced. It used to get so hot in the shelter we ran drier duct from the a/c directly over the cards. And I’ve seen military attenas fixed with tin foil.

Posted at 12:09 am on Jun 4th, 2009 by mykeyFinn

Just rember the ald saying you can fix anything with duct tape, bailing wire, and superglue. I have used bailing wire to fix a falling muffler.

Posted at 12:11 am on Jun 4th, 2009 by mykeyFinn

I could keep going over the years I have perpetrated some hideous fixes, but one last one. I once fixed a drier’s drive belt by replacing it with a strip of bicycle inner tube, come to think of it I haven’t replaced that yet

Posted at 12:14 am on Jun 4th, 2009 by mykeyFinn

Tales of freezing hard drives reminds me… I once had a Mac Plus (y’know, the old style, single box with a built-in B&W screen and the carry handle…) which began to develop a problem… After ten or fifteen minutes of use, the screen would collapse to a single very bright horizontal line. Shutting down (blind, via keyboard commands) and restarting about 10-15 minutes later produced a working computer for another few minutes. Being in my mid-teens with incomplete electronics knowledge and no Torx, I went the ghetto route…
I noticed that when the screen collapsed (I think now it might have been an overheating transformer), part of the case became unusually hot… So I taped one of those gel ice-packs to the hot area on the side of the computer. Lo and behold, the screen remained stable, provided I changed the ice-pack every half-hour or so. Eventually even the ice-packs didn’t help anymore, but I managed to squeeze another couple months of use out of the machine.
They just don’t make electronics like they used to…(out of Bakelite, cast-iron, and chutzpah)

Posted at 1:08 am on Jun 4th, 2009 by HaloInverse

I hear you Phil — I’ve save many a laptop keyboard by letting it soak overnight in distilled water.

My favorite “hack” involved my friend’s car. He lost all but one key for it, and the car required special “secure” keys with a certain resistive value that matched his car. So, he broke out the ohm meter, measured his last key’s ohm rating, grabbed $5 worth of resistors and a trim pot from ratshack, and disassembled his steering column.

One cheap copy of the original key and some fiddling with the trim pot was all it took to get his car to start.

Not bad, considering the other option would have involved spending >$100 on two new keys.

Posted at 1:33 am on Jun 4th, 2009 by daler

I once bought a “broken” ipod nano off ebay which would only work if you bent it severely, so I took it apart, put five layers of electrical tape in the middle of the board to bend it, put it back together and it worked fine for a year after.

Posted at 6:04 pm on Jun 4th, 2009 by anon

You may know this, but the WiiMote occasionally stpos functioning. Phone tech support actually prescribes a good old fashioned whck in the palm with the thing, “loud enough for me to hear over the phone!”, as one guy told me to do it. Beats me why don’t they just make ‘em better…

Posted at 7:16 am on Jun 5th, 2009 by ThunderBird

Once had a huge 20inch CRT that only powered on upside down, used it for over a year thanks to nVRotate :)

Posted at 7:52 am on Jun 5th, 2009 by phrost

Wow, upside-down Playstation. That brings back memories; totally forgot about that.

And I feel dumb that this is the first time I’ve heard of the “HDD in the freezer” trick. Geez, there are several times that would have come in handy–worst time was in college, during finals week. I had all sorts of projects saved on it. Those Quantum Bigfoot drives were terrible.

My favorite “household” fix is cleaning keyboards in the dishwasher. I liked it so much I wrote an article about it:
http://undefinition.googlepages.com/computers-cleankeyboard

Posted at 10:46 am on Jun 5th, 2009 by Undefinition

Similarly to corster

I recently upgraded a XP machine at work from 1GB to 3GB RAM and noticed the cases back was very hot. Both fans in the PSU were dead, so I zip-tied one AMD cpu fan on the inner and some other spare on the back. Note, using twist ties will allow a LOT of noise (assuming the fan isn’t perfectly balanced), rev.2 upgraded to zip-ties. :p

Posted at 1:51 pm on Jun 5th, 2009 by ash

As for the 360, turn it off, stick two whatever in the back to stop the fans, turn on, wait till the 3rrod turns to 2rrod, wait another 30 sec, pull the stuff out the back, let the fan run till it shuts off, shut the whole thing off, wait 10 min, then play. I have a gen 1 360 still going :)

Posted at 12:11 pm on Jun 6th, 2009 by om nom nom nom

I had a laptop that the bottom half didnt work unless we put a small vice on the left bottom edge of the screen

Posted at 7:53 pm on Jun 13th, 2009 by wes

I really love electrical contact cleaner. The stuff drives moisture out of electronics and gets rid of buildup.

Posted at 5:29 pm on Jun 18th, 2009 by scott

The external battery to my old laptop fried one time due to me leaving the ac adapter in too long. So I put it in the freezer for a bit, took it out & worked just fine. I guess I was thinking somewhere along the lines of how cold can make a charge last & heat recharges. -shrug-

Also “if it’s broke, beat it” seems to work on a lot of things. (my fav example is in ffx heehee)

Posted at 10:33 am on Jun 20th, 2009 by isma

i once repaired an LCD panel with a badly damaged front polariser (someone dropped a heavy object on it) by cutting out the damaged section, obtaining a suitably scalpeled and deglued piece of polariser from a scrap panel and then Epoxying it in place. Looks a bit ugly but its an improvement.

If I did this again I would use UV setting PMMA glue as it gives a better result and is colourless.

-A

Posted at 1:23 pm on Jun 20th, 2009 by andre

just found this one, inspired by an article written by Sam Goldwasser in his “TV RepairFAQ”.

turns out that if you connect 11 9V batteries in series across an O/C 24V soldering iron element
it sometimes results in temporary repair that may last long enough to get a spare element.
Total cost:- £18 for the batteries, but if you are out in the field it might be handy.

This technique is hazardous yadayada goggles etc.

Posted at 10:29 am on Jun 22nd, 2009 by andre

LOL christopher when my computer dies i beat on it and it actually fixes it most of the time! (its 500mhz P3 lol) same here with upsidown playstation

Posted at 6:41 pm on Jun 25th, 2009 by jason g

oh so that was it with the old playstation. i remember fixing one for a friend of mine a few years ago, it would only recognize “like-new” discs so i calibrated the laser and it was fine with scratched discs but when i put it back together it wouldn’t work again.

removed the game disc, gave it a little slap, put the disc back and it worked. told her to do just that, and as far as i know it’s still working today, but i guess that only her little sister is still playing it now. :)

Posted at 2:13 pm on Jul 8th, 2009 by Th3_uN1Qu3

I was out camping with friends in the Alberta rockies when his drivers side door speaker in his vehicle quit working. As this was our only source of music for our night time drinking event, a solution was quickly needed. We didn’t have much available for tools, in fact all we had was a pair of pliers and a multi screwdriver, the cheap kind with the bits in the twist off back. So I popped off the door panel, removed the speaker and found the problem. A solder joint had broke, no problem. I used the pliers and a paper clip unbent and heated in the fire as a soldering iron and stripped some extra solder off of an old mouse sitting in the trunk. 20 minutes later and a couple of close calls getting the paper clip hot enough and voila, music!

Posted at 9:28 am on Aug 15th, 2009 by Tater

Back in the day, C=64 power supplies would overheat constantly. Smart people used an old Vic-20 power supply, because they didn’t overheat. Another fix was to put the box inverted in a pan of oil or water to keep it cool.

In the winter, I just flung the box out of a window, so it’d hang there by the power cables from the shut window.

Posted at 10:44 am on Aug 15th, 2009 by Dicky B

My friend had an xbox 360 that only worked upside down (vertically). Another friend had a 4th gen iPod which would freeze and give errors. When this would happen he would hit it and/or throw it against a wall. Eventually it totally went dead.

Posted at 12:43 pm on Aug 15th, 2009 by ZERO16LIVES

lol @ bananaphuc.
my friend had some crappy creative mp3 player, and he lost it in a field near his house. next day, he somehow finds it and notices that the thing is soaking wet from the sprinklers. so, he promptly threw that sob in the dryer and it worked like a charm.

Posted at 2:43 pm on Aug 15th, 2009 by wdfowty

I’ve fixed an IR controlled oscelating fan with a cracked circuit board by soldering twist ties to each end of the broken connections – only some of the soldering worked, but the fan turns on and off and speed adjusts by remote and I never went back. Has worked with this fix for 4 years now – no fires :).

Posted at 4:29 pm on Aug 15th, 2009 by bootyphd

I just got a few things to say if any one reads this far 1) WD40 Works great for cleaning is it non conductive, drys quick, and is a cleaner. 2) If you somehow get bent pins on a CPU i have found most of the time it can be fixed with a credit card or business card. 3) If it is stupid but it works HEY IT WORKS ITS NOT STUPID !!!

Posted at 4:48 pm on Aug 15th, 2009 by -RAGE-

do mega-ghetto lawnmower hacks count? if so, mine may take the cake.

my pull starter broke, so i fixed it. it broke again, so i smashed the cage off with a claw hammer. after my rage subsided, i realized i still had to mow the lawn. here’s where my PHD in ghetto kicks in. i broke out the socket set and found one that fit on the one-way start shaft (7/8″ 12 point works perfectly). i only had a 1/2″ drive that was 7/8″, so i took out the old handy 3/8″ to 1/2″ adapter and hooked it up to a 1/4″ drill to 3/8″ drive adapter. i slapped all 3 pieces together and threw it in my cordless drill. what do you know—-it worked and i still use it till this day. beats pulling the damn rope 100 times LOL.

Posted at 5:35 pm on Aug 15th, 2009 by Scott Loeh

One of my pc’s will only run when flat and will shut off if carefully stood upright.

I had to re-solder the surface mount button for my N95 volume comtrol as it snapped off.(With the bluntest soldering iron ever!)

Also had a playstation that only worked upside down.

The power cable for my laptop only works when its twisted to one side so the power cable has been wrapped round the screen a few times and stuck down with electrical tape for the last 6 months.

Posted at 5:43 pm on Aug 15th, 2009 by Alan

Got lucky & found cheap, broken 1981 arcade game “Bosconian”. Would not POST or boot, just show “random” junk on the screen. Lacking a schematic or a TTL chip tester, I “brute force” fixed it. I guessed at two identical TTL chips, desoldered them, soldered in sockets and then swapped the two chips when putting them back into the sockets. Then I’d power up and see if there was any change in the malfunction. Took about 5 tries, then bingo! It was still malfunctioning, but differently. Easy to swap one TTL with known good one & then start working hard at destroying enemy space-stations.

Posted at 8:50 pm on Aug 15th, 2009 by yagibeer

Somtimes an arm would stick in a hardrive and putting it on flat surface and spinning it like a top will get it to work once it gets turned on. After it turns off however, it needs to be spinned again.

Posted at 11:57 pm on Aug 15th, 2009 by the file clerk

Seeing all the comments about hitting things reminds me of the late 90’s when Maxtor HDs we’re notorious to stick in humid weather. We liked to call our little trick the “Technical Tap”. A good “technical tap” is the way to start any troubleshooting I’d always say…just varies by equipment ;-)

I’m also a big fan of repairs with solder guns and paper clips or even staples. Things I’ve fixed with them: broken 3.5 floppy arm; microwave oven trace & Laserjet paper detect arm (was broken off).

I also like the throw away stories, like the 300CD Sony player someone had dropped and cracked the PS board along the transformer. A little crazy glue, some enamel removal & six solders later (4 transformer contacts and two trace repairs) I had a very expensive player for free.

Posted at 12:26 am on Aug 16th, 2009 by bwmetz

So I have this old porsche 924, and i fixed it with a paperclip.

I had my car fixed at this fancy oldtimer garage, they did a great job but they lost a special rubber knob used for securing the gas pedal cable to the gas pedal. Since i needed a car to drive around in ( and they were on their annual holliday ), i bent the paperclip in just the right way in order to create a clip that would secure it properly.

Posted at 4:46 am on Aug 16th, 2009 by shackadoodl

There was a film crew filming at my school. They had a crt with a cut power cord. A nice clean cut. I know some electronics but i’ve never really dealt with monitors and from what ive heard there are some high voltages that can be stored/run through them but i figured fixing the cord was pretty easy. I had limited tools (I too am poor) so I ended up soldering each wire and taping the whole thing in a nice big jumbled bundle. It looked awful but it worked fine.

ive also had the computers that only worked tilted, keyboards stripped down and cleaned because of spilled milk, sony cameras where i had to basically pull out the lens housing each time it turned on, but the winner goes to…

my alienware laptop… that is hands down the biggest pos i have used in my life. each bootup came with another suprise which required a ghetto fix and tech support (when i finally got them to agree to fix it) put in a few of their own ghetto fixes. too many to list here and it just gets me mad thinking of it again

great list though

Posted at 7:49 am on Aug 16th, 2009 by g

i had an old cell phone that i used to use that looked like hell but still worked, barely. one day it decided not to work. as a last ditch effort to revive the phone the threw it at the floor and to my amazement it bounced and then booted. after that it would never shut off, it would go through the whole shut down screens and sounds but you could hit any button on the keypad and it would immediately take you to the desktop.

Posted at 10:20 am on Aug 16th, 2009 by redneck

I had a cheap mp3 player that went south on me when I put music on it. When it boot up, it does a count of all audio files in storage, but for some reason, after I put about 400 songs on it (only about half of the available space) it would freeze up, and I would have to hit the reset button to shut it off. There was no way to reset it, so after trying everything I could think of, I took it apart, and tried shorting some of the pins on the processor. After 10 minutes of shorting pins with a screwdriver, I was able to get it to bypass the count-check, and go straight into mp3 mode, where I was finally able to connect it to USB and reformat the internal flash. Pretty ghetto, but pretty cool, except afterward I could only put about 20 songs on it or it would glitch out again (a 4GB player).

Posted at 11:20 am on Aug 16th, 2009 by talr

done quite a few ghetto repairs

Current laptop (IBM X31) the sensors for the nipple pointer seem to stick and the mouse will randomly wander to one side of the screen. The solution is to solidly tap just to the right of the right mouse button. Power supply had a frayed wire in it from where it flexed just after the stress relief. Because it was very close to the power brick I couldn’t just cut out and replace the broken section so I just wrapped some florists wire around the fray to bridge the connection. Plugged it in, it sparked a bit, the heat from the parking melted the florists wire and the frayed wire together, worked like a charm for a month or two!

Repaired a dead iRiver h340 (would boot but couldn’t read anything from HDD) for someone by taking it apart smacking the hard drive and reinserting it. Still works to this day I believe

My favourite though is repairing a damaged SMD switch on an LED bicycle light (rusted contacts and couldn’t find a replacement switch) by covering all the contacts in graphite from a pencil, for a few days up until then I used to keep a paperclip to bridge the contacts on the back of the board just visible through an opening to turn it on and off

Posted at 12:32 pm on Aug 16th, 2009 by Spoon!!!

I went on a trip up into the mountains and my xbox got the red ring of death. All I could find was some fairly old Elmer’s glue and luckily Elmer’s conducts a very small amount; at least enough to take off the cheap Chinese thermal paste and run the thing for a few hours at a time.

Posted at 6:06 pm on Aug 16th, 2009 by zippoman

On late 90’s early 00’s Honda Acuras. They had a problem starting while warm. It was due to the starter relay and the lack of solder they used in the relay would crack. Pop it open and put fresh solder on the relay. No problems since.

Batteries. It was listed on this site. Using a welder thats DC based and popping the batteries would revive them back to charging to almost like new. There was another trick with a freezer and battery. Discharge a rechargeable battery then sticking it into the freezer. Once cold, charge it. Repeat a few times could squeeze a little bit more battery life than what you’ve started with. It gained me at one point in time about 15 to 30 minutes on a two year old laptop battery.

Posted at 8:26 pm on Aug 16th, 2009 by crispycritter911

oh god i have a few, Old VW beetle fuel line broke while on the road, fixed with a bic pen by cutting out the crack and shoving it in the ends; throttle cable broke once and fixed it with a girlfriends necklace. the heating in those cars was a fan that pushed air over an exhaust manifold and when the manifold got old rusted and cracked fixed it with aluminum foil and ducktape. that car also had a half of a road sign that kep the battery from falling out of the bottom onto the road.

Posted at 9:18 am on Aug 17th, 2009 by dan

when i want to play a cd in my car i have to skip forward a few tracks and while holding down the rewind/reverse seek button (whever you want to call it) punch it in the display. Ive almost wrecked a few times.

Posted at 9:26 am on Aug 17th, 2009 by ryan

Several years ago, when portable MP3 players first came out, had a crappy old 128MB one that ran off AAs, but the battery life was horrible. So I duct taped a double D cell pack on the back of it, that sucker would run for a week straight. Course, I only had two hours of music on it, whatev.

My laptop dies from static electricity so I’ve covered the speakers and everything metal on it with electrical tape.. which helps. ha

Posted at 5:00 pm on Aug 17th, 2009 by Ryan

I think everyone has done a ghetto repair at some point or another. No technical training is required.

A LOT of things die due to faulty solder connections. Easy to fix, ghetto or otherwise.

I used to fix old Sun4 workstations where the BIOS battery would die due to age. Just pop out the BIOS chip, use a dremel tool to remove the chip casing until you get to the internal battery contacts (these chips had integral batteries encapsulated inside the chip casing). Solder on a CR2032 battery holder, reinstall the chip, reprogram the system id, and you’d be up and running for another 4 years.

Posted at 1:25 pm on Aug 18th, 2009 by signal7

My T-Mobile MDA is the Franken-Phone… reassembled from a “parts phone” and re-soldered here and there. Mostly works. I just can’t stand the idea of entering another contract to avoid paying full price for another PDA phone.

Posted at 5:54 pm on Aug 28th, 2009 by drr

I’ve fixed two cars with the same problem each costing exactly one penny.

On a few older cars the brake lights will light up and stay lit after the car is parked and off. The problem is that the brake pedal arm no longer reaches the switch that opens the circuit to prevent the lights from coming on. Being the practical guy that I am, I superglued a penny onto the brake arm just above the switch to add the extra millimeter of range needed to depress it. It’s been 3 years and both cars are doing just fine with the ghetto solution.

I’ve also done the pot adjust on the PS2 laser to get some extra life out of my dying gen1 PS2. The thing’s still chugging along.

I fixed my girlfriend’s laptop’s screen hinges on several occasions. The hinge design of the HP Pavilion ze2000 are complete crap. They are held to the base frame by 4 quarter inch screws. These quarter inch screws take lateral strains that no screw of that size should take and the heads consistently shear off. After looking around town for replacement screws and finding none I finally cannibalized an old Dell we had lying around for parts. Lo and behold the screws taken from the Dell worked like a charm.

Posted at 9:24 pm on Aug 31st, 2009 by shuttle128

Back in the 1908’s a couple of friends and I went camping WAAAAY out in the woods. The site had electricity, but no phone, and this was before cell phones were ubiquitous.

Being dumb teenagers, we pulled the battery out of the car and used it to troll all over the lake for two days. Surprise, the car wouldn’t start. Couldn’t push-start it, because every direction that wasn’t uphill was into the lake.

I pulled the tail lights out of the car and began poking around inside the old “hi-fi” (complete with turntable and 8-track!) in the cabin until I found a voltage that lit a bulb up nicely without blowing it. Sliced up an extension cord to make jumpers, and charged the battery overnight.

If that had failed, my backup plan was to suspend a bicycle in a tree by bungee chords so that the back wheel rested on the alternator pulley in the car, and then pedal like mad! Fortunately, I didn’t have to try that.

Just yesterday I pulled a Dell 1907FPt monitor out of the trash across the street. It appeared that someone had been stabbing the on/off button with a screwdriver to get it to start. I pulled the button out and enlarged the hole to expose the little button on the circuit board, and it works fine. Using it now.

Also pulled a DVD player out of the trash. It had been rained on, so I opened it up and placed it in front of a fan for a few hours. Haven’t tried to use it yet, though.

Posted at 7:43 pm on Sep 8th, 2009 by bill

That’s 1980’s, not 1908’s! Jeez.

Posted at 1:05 pm on Sep 12th, 2009 by bill

I have a hp laptop that had a bad hd. I tried the freezing it and it worked pretty well for about 6-8 months. I was very pleased with myself.

Posted at 3:54 pm on Oct 6th, 2009 by noviewon

I can coincide with the failed PSU fan hack, I had used not only electrical tape, but a standard drywall screw to kludge a spare one over the back to keep the supply from overheating and knocking off the machine. Worked till I had finally upgraded to a slightly faster machine.

Half the wiring in my car is rigged up by now thanks to a hosed wiring bundle going under the engine.

Posted at 8:43 pm on Oct 6th, 2009 by Cliff

I took my old legend of zelda game for the NES and stuck 2 AAs in it to replace the original battery that keeps the saves.

I also ran 2 wires in my car, one from the battery to the front seat, and one from the front seat to the fuel pump connecter in the trunk, i would twist them together to run my fuel pump, worked for almost a year after that.

Posted at 9:29 pm on Oct 13th, 2009 by jimmy

one i remeber ding is using paper clips to build a hard drive caddy for my pentium. it only had one hard drive spot, so i used the paper clips to mount one drive to the next. shes still running a vpn server to this day. id have to say the worst one ive done was to a micro computer. it had some proprietary seize power supply, and i had one that almost fit, but was about an inch too long. so out comes the dremel tool to cut the case, and a notch out of the 3.5 drive. its still running to this day afaik

Posted at 3:02 am on Oct 15th, 2009 by anon

This isn’t as cool as most fixes here but I was pretty proud of myself.
I had removed a hard drive from my homebrew computer and found that the molex plug was so tight on one of the power pins that it pulled the pin out of the plastic on the hd.
I had an old dead drive (never throw anything away!) so I desoldered one of it’s pins and was able to push it through the good drive’s plastic connector and get it soldered into place. Actually, that was my second attempt as the first time the connector end of the pin bent then broke off when I straightened it.

Great stories – keep ‘em coming.

Posted at 6:49 am on Nov 12th, 2009 by xavieronassis