After hearing that his video card might be repairable by heating it up to reflow it, this user did just that. He stripped it down and tossed it in his oven. It’s amazing how often this type of hackish repair works. We’ve heard of people using candles on ibooks, tossing video cards in oven,s and wrapping an xbox 360 in a towel and running it for 30 minutes to get it hot enough to reflow itself. Why even bother with controlled temperatures and exact measurements? What other crazy fixes have you had to employ? We had a Playstation that only worked upside down.
[via engadget]
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.
I fixed the RROD on my 360 with about $6 in bolts and washers from home depot and a solid 20min of overheating, and it’s still running strong.
fixed a no power V3M RAZR by reflowing the power clock with a lighter!
im still using a 400w soldering iron do desolter the parts which ends up with heavvily destructed pcbs, i usually rebuilt it with a slice of an ata cable, the workflow sucks hard lol
mostly im stuck at buying new things and keeping the old ones for pesonal projects
Long ago I got my first Laserdisc player. it was used, since i was poor. It didn’t play right. it would skip. I discovered that lifting one side of it would make it play correctly. So from that day forth it sat by the TV with a 2×4 under one side.
I have also fixed many a random circuit board with a good scrubbing in the sink with a paint brush and drying using compressed air from my shop compressor.
Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve “fixed” something by banging it on the table.
I had someone I was talking to once with a broken iPod literally drop kick it into a wall. Left a nice dent in the wall, but the iPod worked again. If he was renting, hopefully the security deposit was less than the cost of a new ipod.
uh now i remembered i have an old HP nx8220 laptop :D that will get turned on only if i lift the right corner like for 5cm and press it in the middle. then it boots, without that it only asks for some strange security card :S even if the SC was turned off in bios :S , since it was out of guarantee and HP repairs cost like 600$-700$ for new system board it never get repaired :D so ill try that owen method :D just in cast it might work! :D
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
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
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.)
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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 ^_^.
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.
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.
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.
i once fixed a big screen projection tv by heating up the power supply with a blow drier… who knew?
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.
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 :) ).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
^FYI… The IIe never had a hard drive…
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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…
Once had a huge 20inch CRT that only powered on upside down, used it for over a year thanks to nVRotate :)
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
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
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 :)
I had a laptop that the bottom half didnt work unless we put a small vice on the left bottom edge of the screen
I really love electrical contact cleaner. The stuff drives moisture out of electronics and gets rid of buildup.
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)
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
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.
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
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. :)