| Unusual but useful Laptop Repair |
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| blogs - Tech | |||
| Written by Simon Robinson | |||
| Tuesday, 09 October 2007 15:59 | |||
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This is an article written by Simon Robinson, on http://ablog.apress.com, as some user encounter this type of problem or need to reset there bios this is a realy useful tweak :
For some time I’ve been cursed with laptop that, every so often (a couple of times a year), just decides to refuse to boot up - when it gets into that state, absolutely nothing I can do will get it to do anything more than hum for a few seconds while displaying a completely blank screen. The first time it happened I sent it back to the manufacturer, Acer (it’s a Travelmate 290), and discovered over the course of the next few laptop-less months how useless Acer appears to be at repairing their own computers. So the following couple of times it happened I’ve instead sent it to a local computer repair shop, Mattick Computers, where they dismantle it, do something I don’t understand to the BIOS, and it comes back bootable again. Within a couple of days, not 3 months later. The technician there is becoming very familiar with my laptop!
Yesterday I got it back from them as usual, but with a difference. The technician showed me a couple of wires he’s added, poking into the memory compartment.
He explained that this was so that if the problem happened again, I don’t have to take it into the repair shop. Instead, I can just take the protective plastic casing off the wires, and momentarily touch them together, after which the laptop should reboot OK. When I asked what, more precisely, the wires did, I think his reply went something along the lines that they short out the battery, which forces the BIOS to reset itself. And on desktops there’s normally a switch to do that, but on laptops you can’t do much other than dismantle the laptop. But I may have misunderstood something.
I’m curious to know if anyone with more knowledge of laptop hardware has ever encountered this, or has any idea whether this explanation makes sense. My instinctive reaction is that shorting out the battery sounds rather a dangerous thing to do?
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 11 October 2007 03:51 |
