Faulty laptop video output – January 2009

One evening, this friend of mine called in for an emergency: there was this laptop, neither very new, nor extremely neat that had been acting up for a couple of days and needed to be taken care of. What I found out was something both random and repeatable: the systematic disruption of the image to the external monitor, or of the independent colors.

What happened?

Most owners strongly deny any “responsibility” for the cause of this defect – and this friend of mine made no exception to the rule. However, when asked if he uses a second monitor, he said he did, when he was playing.
To me, it had already become clear: frequent connect/disconnect VGA cable (1 per day is in the hundreds) and perhaps forced position on the table – especially in the “fog of war” …

What We did

I was on a rush, the repair was done on the spot, therefore the one option I had was to reheat soldering with very little solder, and a good clean with pickling solution (I know, it’s funny, my 1970 Technical Dictionary also says so…).
We wanted to strengthen the structure, using a “buttress” from resin, to lower the risks…

Technical part

I used a Weller, some resin solution (I know it’s acidic, but still good if you clean it right away…), isopropyl alcohol and a lot of cotton buds. In addition, we plug in a VGA cable for repositioning, and a VGA monitor for verification.
Because we had them laying around, I used a compressor and accessories …

The Repair

Being in a hurry, as I said, we had to prepare the welding zone with the solution, then we welded, removed the couple of tin bridges with a chip of sticlo-textolit(*), and cleaned everything thoroughly with isopropyl alcohol.
It took us a while, because it had to take less. In fact, it took more to take pictures, especially the “torture” of using a magnifying glass … yet, the pictures are not at the quality or the scale we desired (which you should have been accustomed to by now), we had no way to take them again either…

Final Result

Eventually, everything turned out to be OK, so, as far as we know, it has been functioning properly ever since, provided it didn’t “die” of natural causes. In fact, the only risk was peeling the laminated wiring, but not for someone as experienced as we are… 🙂
(We have to brag, we’re “on the net”…)