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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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 !!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s 1980’s, not 1908’s! Jeez.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Don’t be a doubter…
This is the sh!t.
I baked a systemboard from a Gateway 450SX4 as a last throw against purchasing another systemboard. I could push the video chip and the video would scramble and/or clear. After baking it – viola! A working laptop. Survived a 24 hour system stress test and my niece on Christmas day for several hours!
So, I wreckless eyeballed my old IBM Thinkpad T21 which would just lock up and die, yet when you pushed the power button, it would reboot and restart, just to lock up again. Let it cool down – and it would work for maybe 45 minutes before crapping out again. Baked the systemboard, and I watched Reservoir Dogs this afternoon and am posting from the T21 right now!
Hey – if you have nothing else to lose and have the skill to disassemble and reassemble it – give it a try! All you’ll waste is time – or, like me – resurrect two dead laptops!!!!!
2 days ago i fix my friends psp that the screen was b&w till hit or booted upsided down i opened it up and fiddled with the screen it worked till i put the home pause ect buttons back on it went back to b&w till i put the buttons on it worked next fix a wd ipod touch
I remember back in the 90s resetting of password protected detachable face mercedes car stereos required placing the faceplate in the freezer for a day or so.
Have a cell phone charger that only works when the phone is dangling from the wallwart, putting tension on the cord. Too lazy to resolder.
guess this is a necro bump here but who cares. long ago my dad and I were on a hunting venture, in the old junky truck. Come to find out, my friend and I who’d worked on it to ready it for adventure had bolted the intake manifold on top of some important wires. 500 miles later and in the middle of nowhere, the thing catches fire, shorts out and drains the battery. The wiring repairs were pretty easy, but we overlooked the need for having a battery charger handy. We did find an old vacuum cleaner in the behind the hunting cabin though, and there was plenty of 110v outlets handy. A quick ghetto rig and an hour later, we had charged the battery by spinning the alternator with the vacuum cleaner motor. Made it to the deer stand the next day, and killed our deer. Rednecks ftw
You can do the same thing with Alienware laptops for the GPU’s. Put in oven at 350 for about 10 minutes. I have done a couple my self.
My wife spilled Dr. Pepper on/in her Nintendo DS once. I disassembled it, gave the board a bath in alcohol until the syrup was dissolved, and let it dry for a couple of days. Worked like a charm. Alcohol also removed markings from a couple of chips, but I didn’t care. Putting electronics that have been submerged in water into a bag of rice for a couple of days also works really well.