Gateway W322

Well this has been a first. I received a call from a customer today for help with a Gateway W322. This was a mid-range laptop; fairly decent specs and certifications so I was fairly surprised when I found that it had just quit on him. He was using it at the airport just before boarding and when he arrived in Columbus, Ohio it just stopped. Black screen and no fan or hard drive spinning. The only sign of life on this thing were a couple of LED's on the front that were lit up. Voltages were all good, very little dust inside, hard drive was in good shape and was even able to pull some data off of it. It's like someone just pulled the motherboard out and left the power supply board inside. While investigating replacing the motherboard I found that not one of my vendors has this motherboard. It's like Gateway built this for two months and then just quit. All after market parts for this thing are fans, ram and lcd screens. Not one motherboard. I unfortunately had to tell him prior to diagnosing his laptop that there was little to no hope of finding a replacement motherboard if the diagnosis pointed to that. My recommendations for him were to pull data off of the drive and buy another laptop. I suggested he buy a refurbished laptop but for his purposes(gaming) he needed something with a little more power to it. Right a good benchmark to determine a high end computer is if the computer is using bio-metrics of some sort. These computers usually employ additional testing in the certification process and can be mid-range($600-700) to high-end($1500-2000) latpops. This was what I suggested for him and one diagnosis fee later we went our separate ways. What a bummer, I hate leaving customers with big, broken paperweights. Where's the fun in that?


BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901

Cold Weather & DC Power Jacks?

I'm not sure what's going on lately but there seems to be a rash of bad DC power jacks. I have had 4 different customers with bad DC jacks. I can only blame it on the cold weather. It's always interesting repairing these because the laptop has to be completely disassembled just to get to the jack. While repairing one of these I came across a laptop running the beta version of windows 7. Kind of interesting, it looks a lot like Vista.

The other laptop I repaired this week was one that kept eating hard drives. This laptop was in a very dirty condition. I blasted it with canned air and swore I saw a mouse run out of it. I can't stress enough how important it is to keep the vents and fans clean. I still have to run a diagnostic on this laptop but I am pretty sure, from prior experience, that the temperature on the hard drive should be lower after this cleaning.

BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901

Unhappy customer from Geak-squad

Okay, so I found another Geak-squad unhappy customer(actually they found me) who was charged big bucks to have drivers downloaded onto their computer. I know, I know, the spelling is incorrect for that company that works out of Worst Buy, I don't want to get in trouble for inappropriately using their name. Anyway, in addition to the driver issue above, they never diagnosed the original issue which was what caused 2 hard drives to crash and burn. The longer I'm in this business the more disturbing it is that people are being taken advantage of. I understand the technicians need experience and they should get it by taking jobs like working at Worst Buy but the senior guys need to catch this stuff and get things fixed right.

It was really sad because this particular customer has a husband who is out of work and they need the laptop to assist him in finding a job through the internet. Now, for the 3rd time they have a bad hard drive and have no idea why. It is a Dell computer and I'm pretty sure it's either a user environmental issue or it needs a good solid cleaning. In anycase, we'll get this figured out and shouldn't cause too much of a headache for anyone.

Another customer contacted me about a DC power jack on another HP. Shouldn't take too long on this one either.


BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901

Failure

Well, it happens. I ended up not fixing a customer's computer. I took in someone's laptop that had viruses, spyware and such. It was a Pentium 3 Gateway with 2000 loaded on it. Well, in the the midst of it the LCD light went out. This computer was about 5-6 years old and I advised the customer that it wasn't worth dumping the money into. I didn't charge the customer because the laptop was not finished being repaired. The total cost for it would've equaled out to the price of one of the refurbished laptops I sell. The refurbished laptop would've been a step up too, from a hardware point of view. I guess I'll just wait and see if they want to purchase a refurbished one or if they want to dump the money into the old one.

The other laptop I worked on this week was another DC power jack. Must be something about the cold weather. I was up until 1 A.M. working on that one. It was another Gateway. What is about Gateway laptops right now?

I have a couple of other laptops that I'm working on right now too. Both are Dell laptops. One has a bad LCD and the other has some missing key's. The retainers are usually the weak point on the missing key's. I've seen everything from someone overusing certain keys to cat's pulling them off for the fun of it causing these to come off. I'll post more stories as I hear them. Stay tuned.

BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901

Current Activities

Well, it's been a while since my last blog. Been having to postpone something since we lost our contractor and I had to do all our repairs ourselves.

Well since the last blog I've had a couple of laptops that I've been working on. The first was someone who found me on http://www.google.com/. It was another customer with a power jack that had went bad on them. This particular repair is on a gateway and was broken when a dog chewed through the power cord and tugged the power cord out of the laptop.

The other problem is a repeat problem from a customer who had a Compaq motherboard issue. I thought it might've been a memory issue but when I replaced the memory modules with new ones the problem persisted. HP said the laptop is still under warranty so I will return this to the customer for him to return it and get it fixed again.

That's all for now, hopefully the next post will be sooner than the last one.
BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901