Slow Dell laptop with charging problems

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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.

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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.

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