And I shall name thee Lazarus!

Lazarus the Laptop. Recently, my trusty Acer Aspire 5100 developed a problem staying connected to my CD drive. After many times of having the drive fall out (due to the screw I didn’t put in to keep it in place) the internal connector on my laptop’s mainboard no longer made a solid connection to the optical drive.

Let’s face it: most people can’t unsolder a connector and replace it with a good one. I am one of the most. So my solution was to go to eBay and buy an identical laptop and slide in my Lightscribe, memory and HD into it, and sell mine at a discount reflecting the lack of an optical drive. The one I selected had a “screen problem” and I took this to mean the LCD needed some work, perhaps an inverter board or maybe the fluorescent tube was bad. Maybe both. They’re easy to replace.

Except when the “new” system arrived, the “screen problem” wasn’t the screen, it was the motherboard! The video was bad. The seller gave a credit.

But now I had 2 broken laptops. So, back to eBay I go, and buy yet ANOTHER system. The price was too good to pass up, and the system had a 14 day guarantee AND offer of an extended warranty.

Now here’s where I learned a critical piece of information: Acer made (at least) 2 versions of my laptop. One uses SATA, which is what I have…but my #2 buy on eBay doesn’t.

So, now I’m pissed. I’ve spent well over the cost of a repair and it’s not repaired.

Earlier I was stumbling and found a blog where a guy took his high end video card that fritzed out and baked (yes BAKED) it to reflow the solder.

So I did the same to the mainboard with the video issues.

Yeah, it worked. And I now call the laptop Lazarus.