Looks like we had better take this apart…
A Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop, bought to me with multiple problems…
- Very slow, both in use and starting up
- Battery life was poor
- Power connector broken, intermittent problems
Apart from these, the laptop was otherwise good. Even though Windows Vista is getting a bit old now Microsoft will support it until 2017, so the laptop is worth spending a bit of money on.
With the laptop in pieces we see that the power connector is cracked, and the circuit board is bent too.
Damaged power board, which was replaced
Fortunately a replacement for this little PCB can be bought for £5.
With laptops that are slow to start there are two options; either manually work on them for hours hoping that an improvement will be seen, or do a factory reset. I chose the latter as it seemed the most effective solution in this particular instance. The hard disk was cloned (as a backup, and to check for disk errors), after which I do the factory reset, including re-loading the customer’s files. By the time we’ve finished it will be good as new!
Here we have the finished laptop, cleaned and ready to go.
I charged the customer £50 for this, which covered several hours labour plus £5 for the power circuit board and £8.50 for the new battery.
