Busy, busy, busy.

Today was one of those days, busy, but definitely a good problem to have. Had 5 people contact me regarding laptop repair. The first customer had a cracked LCD screen on a Gateway W350A. The next customer had a more challenging issue for an Acer Aspire 5670. Her fan was failing with itand could not find a replacement anywhere. It took about 40 minutes and a lot of searching vendor's inventories but I found what I believe is the only in the US. Hers shouldn't be too difficult to replace. The next one is a Dell 6400. Another broken LCD screen. The 4th one today was a Compaq Presario with a bad LCD screen. Finally, the 5th one today was another Compaq Presario with a bad inverter. Whew... what a day. Think I'll be busy for a couple days.


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

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

Dell Latitude, Compaq Presario, Gateway

Today I picked up a Dell Latitude(has broken LCD) from a customer who did all the right things. He backed up his hard drive data, checked to make sure his computer worked with an external monitor and kept the laptop meticulously clean. In his case there was an accident and the entire computer's screen looked like a work of art when powered up. There were spidercracks all over the screen and it displayed black and white spots all over the screen with some rainbow colors sprinkled throughout. Typical LCD replacement if I've ever seen it.

The Compaq presario had met a similar fate but you could still see half the screen. Being a 17 inch display the price was going to be a little higher than the Latitude described before.

The Gateway is a completely different story. This was not in good condition at all. The laptop was given as a gift from the owner's Mom. The battery was dead and there was a virus on the computer. Batteries are notorious for dying prematurely if you use the laptop as a laptop. What do I mean? Plug in whenever you can. Batteries in laptops have a certain amount of times that you can recharge them before they go bad. The new MacBoook pro's are able to be recharged 1000 times before being replace. The competion, about a 3rd of that. Use your laptop like a desktop as much as possible and use the battery for backup power alone and you'll extend the life of the battery to a much longer time and when you do need the backup power, it'll be there.



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

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

Toshiba parts, LCD Compaq Presario & DC Power Connector

Today's kind of been a busy day for calls. One person contacted me about getting a battery & a hard drive cover for a Toshiba Tecra 8200. The next call was about an LCD on a compaq presario that had cracked and he needed it replaced. Later on in the day I received a call about replacing a DC power connector. Looks like my weekend is getting pretty packed.

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

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

Compaq Presario 1800 & Bad Hard Drive

Had a couple of customers today. One customer stood out in my mind as I have had problems with inverters for different customers. She had the typical symptoms where the laptop would be fine until it had remained powered on for a few minutes and then the screen would go dark. For this type of failure it could be 2 different issues. The giveway that it is either of these issues involves using a really bright flashlight shone at an angle to the screen. If you see a faint image then it means you either have a bad backlight in the LCD or the inverter is bad. The backlights are made to last a really long time and unless you noticed your screen was pink on bootup the problem lies with the inverter 99% of the time.

Well enough about that. The other customer had a bad backup hard drive. It was very necessary for the customer to have it as his business files for taxes were all on it. This time it was completely unrecoverable without having a clean room. To properly fix this it would mean disassembling the hard drive and putting new reading heads and stepper motors into the drive. This kind of cost can be in the $500-1500 range and has to be done in a clean room. While this is expensive nothing can be too expensive to replace documents, pictures or any other special memories on your hard drive so please consider some sort of backup plan for your data.

Keep posted for other laptop & computer related problems. Peace out

Ben Martin

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

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

Computer Upgrade & LCD replacement

Recently an embroidery company contacted me with a request to upgrade his computer. He is currently using an old 486 computer that is connected to embroidery equipment that is just as old. This will be a fairly involved upgrade as all of his backup files are on floppy disks and all working files are saved to his hard drive on the 486. There can be no downtime as this is his business and with baseball season right around the corner embroidery business is about to reach it's peak period. This is a very critical upgrade since it is not a matter of if the hard drive is going to fail, but when. With a computer that is over 12 years old and used every day, it could happen anytime. I'll be posting more on this job as the day's progress.

The other computer that I was contacted about was a Gateway E475M that needed an LCD replaced. This one is a pretty straightforward repair and I don't imagine seeing any issues with replacing it. The story behind this one is pretty typical. Laptop was just sitting ther minding it's own business until a dog decided it would look better sitting on the floor so the dog assisted. The LCD broke and then the owners called me.



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

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

Dell Inspiron Laptop

Recently I repaired a Dell Inspiron Laptop. This one had a virus. The user had attempted to remove the virus himself to no avail. It took 5 hours but eventually I was able to remove the trojan virus that had embedded itself in several parts of the registry and even backup restore points the user had created. It's no wonder he couldn't remove the virus since every time he would reboot the computer would be reinfected from one of the backup restore points. After this windows would finally allow the computer to update itself. In addition, there were quite a few things slowing the computer. One of the biggest problems I saw was he had 2 antivirus programs running. I removed both, one was non-updating and the other I've never heard of, and installed AVG Antivirus from www.download.com. After this and a couple of tweaks the laptop sped along doing what it needed to do for the user. Another job well done.

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

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

Acer Aspire & Thinkpad T43

Okay, the problem with the Acer Aspire is an easy one but as with all the other DC power jack repairs I've done it's very time consuming and attention to detail is very necessary so that no screws are left behind.

The other computer on the other hand has been a little more interesting. It's an IBM Thinkpad T43. I'm pretty sure I talked about it in a previous posting. Aside from the LCD issue and the dead bios battery the software has been a little challenging. For one, defragment(which I strongly recommend!) was not able to run. The fix for this time was easy. I ran a checkdisk on each of the two hard drives and rebooted the computer so the checkdisk could be thorough. After rebooting defragmentation was now allowed and all was well with the world. On top of that there were a lot of problems with background programs starting up and good ol' CCleaner(www.ccleaner.com) came to the rescue again. Many, many Window updates later the laptop was zipping along nicely and booted up pretty quick too.

Now I know this is a laptop blog but I've got an interesting case for a desktop issue this weekend that a friend referred me to. The problem was this; a newly built computer was having trouble when turning the computer on. One symptom of the the problem was that it would take successive pushes of the power button to turn the computer on. More than likely what is happening is that the power supply, while rated @ 650 watts, can't handle the startup of all the devices in the system. It may be able to supply 650 watts when up and running but not from a cold boot. The solution, research, research, research. Don't buy a $300 motherboard, $250 processor and then buy a $20 power supply. Anyway, that's my desktop helping for you, I'll try to keep those to a minimum.



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

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

IBM Thinkpad T43

Hey all, just received an IBM ThinkPad T43 that has a few issues with it, mostly software. It starts up very slow and responds to commands even more slowly. I think this is a good example where Ccleaner will come in handy to track down different unnecessary applications starting up in the background. The Thinkpad is also having an issue remembering the date. This is something controlled by the bios and means the lithium battery connected to it(not the main laptop battery) is failing and needs replaced. Sometimes you get lucky and it's accessible through a small panel on the bottom somewhere. That's not the case with the T43 since I have to remove the keyboard to get to it. Always be careful since the battery is connected to the motherboard and touching the motherboard has the potential to cause ESD damage to it. Since I will be removing the laptop keyboard anyway to remove the display to replace a failing lcd, it's going to save the customer some money while I do 2 things at the same time. The real costly item here is tracking down the issues slowing down his computer. Thinkpads are always fun to take apart since they are built so well. I love looking inside these things.

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

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

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

Laptop Repair Log, 12/29/08

Today was more of a typical day. It began with a usual software issue with Vista Home edition. I've been running into a lot of these ever since Vista came out. The problem I came across today was a laptop that could not login to the primary account. The error messages coming up were Group Policy Client Service Failed - Access denied. The Group Policy Client Service is a new service that was started with Vista. The most common fix for this is to start the computer up in Safe Mode using the default F8 on boot-up. This will bring up a Windows selection screen to allow you to enter safe mode. From there login as the administrator erase the non-working profile or create another profile with administrator privileges and login. If you decide to erase the non-working profile, reboot the computer into safe-mode again and create the profile you erased. There's a log of technical stuff going on in the background but this should solve 90% of these types of failures.

The other laptop repairs today were hardware related. The first was a DC power jack replacement and the other was a broken LCD. The DC power jack will require a complete tear down of the laptop, carefully desoldering the bad one and soldering the new one in. Both of these are fixable and I was able to find parts for it. Both laptops were Dell computers so the parts were readily available.

That's all for today, stay tuned for what I run into tomorrow.
BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901
Columbus, OH 43229

Group Policy Client Service Fail

Merry Christmas

Hi everyone,
It's been a wonderful Christmas and I was excited to get some new DVD movies and games I will be enjoying on my laptop computer. It looks like I will have to upgrade my own laptop because I had to lower some of the video settings on a new game in order for it to work properly. In any case I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and got lots of techno-goodies. That's all for this blog, stay posted for more.

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

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

Yesterday I had a chance to help a customer locate a used Mac. I've discovered quite a bit about Apple products since I started this business since most of my dealings have been with Windows before the business started. I would definitely recommend purchasing a newer Mac(ie. MacBook) vs. an older one (ie. G4) because of the incorporation of Intel chips. In addition to that the older Macs are still better feature-wise than some of the new Windows computers that claim to have good photo editing software. I had to recommend a MacBook, not the Pro version, but the lower end one for his music and picture needs.

The other customer I had over the busy Christmas shopping weekend was someone having trouble with an HP laptop intermittently not displaying anything on the screen. Sounds like an easy fix but the intermittent issues are always a little difficult to find. Doesn't sound like a motherboard issue but there has been a run of HP products lately with wierd failures like this. About a 1.5 months ago I had one where it would randomly shut off. Traced it down to the motherboard and ended up saving the customer some serious cash when I found out there was a recall on his specific model. Just an FYI laptop users, check with your manufacturer for recalls, you never know what you may find out! Yes, even if it means no business for me I'm interested in getting you up and running again. I like fixing laptops and providing low costs for customers, it makes me happy and it's pretty challenging.

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

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

BRM Laptop Repair bloggin debut

Well, hello blogging world. My name is Ben and I am the owner of BRM Laptop Repair in Columbus, Ohio. I have been relying on word of mouth and google searches to aid my customers in finding me, a reputable laptop repair shop. Now I'm officially into the blogging world and look forward to gaining more customers and posting some of the daily things I'm up to as well. I provide laptop repair at competitive prices and after hours since I spend all day tinkering with electronics as an electronics hardware engineer with a company called Nivis. I have had BRM Laptop Repair open officially for 9 months now and have seen great success in servicing laptops for insurance agencies, IT departments, engineers, banks, realtors, payroll departments and many, many residential customers that live, work and worship in the Central Ohio area. Personally I have been fixing and repairing desktops and laptops(notebooks) for Macs and Window users for 15 years but definitely see a trend towards laptops and desktops going away hence starting up a niche in laptop repair. I have seen all types of problems from viruses, spyware, OS reinstalls, data recovery issues, many hardware problems and hardware upgrades. I have seen many other problems but I could go on forever on laptop issues. Recently I just reached agreements with a Colorado based data recovery group that specializes in data recovery from any form of electronic media in any partition format(Window, Linux or Mac). I am very excited about this as I have limited resources here in Columbus and at points have had to turn some customers to competitors because the damage was too severe to the hard drive. I can now provide even better services for my customers with damaged hard drives. In any case to give you an idea of what I did this past week(Hopeful to update more often than every week!) I have sold one used laptop, recovered data off a laptop that had liquid spilled on it, revived an old laptop that the customer thought for sure was done for(spyware, viruses and a bad DSL connection) and provided some training for that same customer, and found a power adapter for a MAC user. Kind of a slow week. Next week will be even slower I'm sure with Christmas right around the corner but after that begins the new year with new laptop problems. Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year!
BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901
Columbus, OH 43229