Can I Fix These Broken Lenovo Mini PCs?

[Music] hey what's up guys today we're going to be taking a look at three of these Lenovo m715q I think small form factor desktops that supposedly don't work I bought three of them on eBay let's see if we can uh fix them [Music] first of all sorry for the bad lighting and potentially bad audio I'm trying to have a good setup to where you can see me and also see what's going on down here and also see what's on screen when we hopefully get these up and posted so yeah I think we basically just Dive Right In I guess I could talk about I bought these three on eBay for I think 175 dollars for a lot of them they're listed as not working uh but hopefully we can uh fix that and maybe I've seen enough of her YouTube fixing videos that there's always a likelihood there's always a chance that one of these at least one of these just works so I'm not banking on that but uh yeah let's give it a shot so we're going to I have one working power supply for these um so we're going to set up the first one here plug in oh I need DisplayPort we'll plug in DisplayPort here do you have a mouse and keyboard as well we'll uh be positive here and go ahead and plug a mouse keyboard in see what happens there's actually one that has a keyboard icon here just to be safe I'm gonna plug this into that Port I don't think it matters I don't know okay so we have DisplayPort we have keyboard mouse just in case let's turn this guy on oh okay so the fan is spinning up fan is still spinning not sure if you can hear it [Music] okay so no display just fans ramping up to Max it sounds like and sitting there we'll give this just a little bit I don't think this would be like memory training or anything but we'll just give it a second no caps lock on the keyboard okay yeah I'm gonna call it so we just get a fan spin no post um yeah it doesn't seem like it's posting at all I should also mention at this point I am not an expert at all when it comes to stuff like this so if you're watching this expecting that to be the case you're in the wrong place I'm just a hobbyist looking to have some fun okay so that's number one let's see number two does also sorry if the camera shakes a little bit I didn't think about the fact that my camera's on my table that may be shaking a little bit so apologies like I said I'm an amateur actually gonna mark this number one so we don't forget on to number two right on okay same thing so far fan is spinning up [Music] okay so yeah it seems like this one may be doing the same thing hmm yep same thing no caps lock on the keyboard no post so let's move on to number three all right number three here we go fan spin and not a whole lot else a caps lock okay well it seems like none of these want to post which to be fair is what they were listed as on the eBay description um let's crack this one open and see if there's anything noticeably obvious or something like that I'm pretty sure these all include RAM and the CPU I doubt all three of these have a dead CPU or something and I think we'd get a postcode if it was a CPU error same with memory you typically would get not always I've learned my lesson there yeah let's go ahead and uh crack this thing open real quick move these cables out of the way this is a I think it's just one screw to take this panel off okay [Music] I think there's just one screw I've seen so I'm picking this just slides off Oh wrong way there we go okay yeah this whole front panel comes off too okie dokie so it looks fairly clean a little Dusty but not really so it looks pretty clean and let's maybe start with this [Music] this little Drive caddy here maybe we can take this out and get to the ram it looks like [Music] what am I missing here [Music] there you go okay and it's connected to the Wi-Fi adapter I'm just gonna take um I thought I had a pair of pliers okay I have a little multi-tool that usually stays on my desk but I took it to the video shoot for a video that maybe out by now may not be out by now I'm not really sure I'm just going to take this off so I can get this little Wi-Fi card out without having to pop off these little teeny tiny little teeny tiny guys here hopefully you can see all this okay I'm not uh I'm not an expert when it comes to setting up this stuff so okay so this little hard drive caddy came out but the looks to be maybe the I guess maybe they used this as an antenna I'm not I'm not actually sure because this is Wi-Fi Bluetooth I imagine so I'm not sure what how does it gets used exactly come out make sure this little plastic piece here does I took this Wi-Fi card out partly to get it out of the way but also just because I've learned in the past that sometimes just unplugging devices not having as many things plugged in whether it's a USB device or whatever is a good thing when trying to troubleshoot because sometimes I mean I've had USB devices plugged in and that's been the cause of something not posting before so I think I'm going to take the ram out really quick we have two four gigabyte sticks I think these are four gigabyte sticks of DDR 4 can't quite tell because there's too many stickers on here but I think it's four gigabyte sticks so we're gonna take these out and just see what it does hopefully we get some uh some beeping okay so we're getting a postcode now at least so that at least means that the motherboard might not be completely fried or something let's try just putting one of these back in don't know which one's the correct single slot to use but we'll just try one let's see what happens okay interesting this is very similar actually what happened to my I forgot the I forgot the CPU it's not a j4125 it's a something um little CPU I had a little HP motherboard I had um that needed low power um LP DDR3 memory and I was using the wrong Ram and this is very similar to the you know to what I saw happen there so I'm curious I imagine this is the correct Ram crazy to think that the ram is bad that didn't see very well it's crazy to think that the ram would be bad on all of these so let me try this again different dim different slot whoa hey interesting no media present that's correct okay interesting I'm gonna plug this keyboard back in I wonder if we can get to a some kind of bios screen here I'm just going to try some keys I didn't see any pop-up on the splash screen so I'm just going to try delete an F12 here hope for the best okay interesting okay so we have system summary AMD ryzen 5 2400 GE with Radeon Vega graphics CPU core count everything looks good there we have four gigabytes of memory so that's right let's okay interesting user can use alt P to power on if the USB keyword is plugged into the right correct USB port so that's what that little keyboard icon was I I don't imagine this is anything to do with it but I'm going to turn this off just to be safe I I wonder I'm just going to do actually load optimize defaults OS optimize defaults some settings below are changed accordingly select enabled Windows 10 certification I'm going to try to go load optimize defaults really quick because we may even try to I don't even know what I have available to boot from but we might try booting from Linux or something so F10 to save I don't know what I clicked delete an F12 so hopefully it's one of these two I'm just gonna keep clicking these two looks like one of them was the boot menu my guess is F12 was the boot menu okay so I'm going to I'm going to grab something really quick I'll be right back wow that was fast it's almost like the magic of editing I'm gonna plug this little flash drive in and see if we can boot from something just out of curiosity let's reset this okay so maybe it's actually delete it's the boot menu not sure I was trying F12 nothing happened and then yeah so okay cool so let's try booting from this is vintoy actually verification failed K is do you have secure boot enabled imagine secure boot would be disabled but I didn't check now that I think about it so I'm really glad we at least got one of these booted doesn't seem like everything is working properly but we'll get there The Cure boot aha disabled I actually don't know what setup mode is I don't I don't know much about secure boot honestly interesting so it seems like this bios is a kind of I'm not sure if this is a specific bios that's on here or UEFI I guess or um that's more for administrative like business something but yeah I'm not sure I'm not an I.T guy so but I don't know what this require pop is I'm going to turn it off I'm going to delete all these passwords just to be safe okay save changes exit let's restart and see if we can boot into Linux off of this event toy drive uh I should have gone to the boot menu that was my fault oh it did it oh no I killed it okay hold on hey and it looks like we made it into y let's do think I thought you could try I guess maybe it's just Ubuntu I thought you could try run Debian off of this but but hey we heck we booted here now I'm gonna try to figure out what what was keeping this from booting so I'm going to turn this off I'm going to turn the power off I'm going to swap this dim for this one so we at least know we have a working Ram slot here why do you not want to go in there we go okay so let's try this and if this doesn't work then I'd say there's a good chance we know that that dim is bad interesting okay so that is a no post there let's go ahead and turn this off okay so bad Ram module and a known working slot I think let's put this guy back in try it in the other slot I probably should have pulled the power but see what happens now I'm gonna be really sad if it doesn't boot at all there we go okay so it looks like yeah we have two good slots and one bad dim here so I'm actually just going to make a little Mark on this one so I remember the good news is we know we have a working motherboard CPU and memory module so we can do that'll help with some testing I was I was nervous if it came down to like CPUs that I'd have to worry about swapping out CPUs with my wife's computer because she actually has the only am4 system in this house so she might have been irritated if I had to start popping CPUs in there so okay possibly bad module good module good motherboard good CPU good good everything else so um I think I'm going to leave this one disassembled and just put it off to the side for a bit and then um come back to number I guess number two so let me get that done and I'll meet you right back here okay so we're back we have the system number two here on the table and we're going to go ahead and do the same thing we'll pop this guy open and just see what we're dealing with he looks pretty similar pretty clean a little bit of dust maybe on the CPU fan let's go ahead and take this guy off oh interesting interesting we have different dimms here than in that one alrighty well I'm gonna take this out again just once again so we don't have any extra stuff plugged in we don't need that could be causing issues I'm just gonna leave that there I'm just going to pop both of these out and pop in our known good Ram module and see what we're left with all right so here's the one good Ram module it doesn't seem like it has any issues posting necessarily with either slot so granted it could be a bad memory slot but I think I think we'll be fine so this is system number two known good memory let's give it a shot see if anything happens hmm nothing that's a bummer [Music] okay um Grant it could be the CPU um it could also be the memory slot let's go ahead and just try I think I'm going to try just doing a different memory slot really quick all right let's see if this does anything different for us come on nope doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like it okay so could try swapping the CPU out it could be a bad motherboard um could be a bad bios chip like a corrupted bios that's possible bios bios I'm not really sure could be something else but if it's the motherboard like a like a board level repair issue on the motherboard I'm probably probably stuck there because um I did get a hot air station but that does not mean I know how to repair these things so I'm actually going to pop system three I'm gonna put this one back together really quick I'm gonna pop system three on here and then see if uh using good Ram we can we can fix that up again see if we get at least maybe two easy fixes because if all I have to do is buy a couple dimms to get this up and running or to get two of these up and running I'd say that is a big win overall so far these have been really easy to work on though I will give Lenovo that it's one screw to open up the case one screw to take off the hard drive caddy to change Ram two screws that's not that is not bad at all good job Lenovo occasionally you do things well [Music] okay so I think this may actually be once again a different oh no this is about they look similar yeah okay so I think one and two have the same dims three had some different dims so once again I'm just going to pop these open and see if we use known good memory what happens let's just try to get a post here [Music] come on well nothing I'm gonna try the second ram slot just to be safe spin it back up I don't think it's gonna do anything yeah okay well that's a bummer so we have so far one working computer just with one seemingly bad Ram module and then we have two that don't want to post with working Ram so I'm going to I think what I'm going to do now I may do some of it off camera or just sped up I think I'm going to um test all of our Ram in the known working system and just make sure and get like an inventory of what all Ram works and then I think I might swap it start swapping CPUs into the other motherboards just to make sure it's not a CPU issue I don't think it would be um I really don't want to do that because it's going to be a lot of work but we'll give it a shot so uh yeah I'm gonna swap out I'm gonna test all of our RAM and see what we got hey cool so I actually put both dims in from system one and it seems to be posting just fine so uh we at least have three modules that work at this point so let's try out the Ram from system number two we're back we tried out the Ram from system two and now system or system one and now system two and um this is system two pulled up we see we have eight gigabytes of memory so that's great um that means it's actually our Ram is is working besides seems to be this one doom and I'll probably like off camera just triple check that this dim is actually bad but that seems to be the case so we have one working system unfortunately I think I'm going to swap out CPUs now I don't want to do that but I think I'm going to swap out CPUs now and um make sure all of our CPUs work just to narrow things down so I might do that on camera I might do that off camera we'll see I'll for sure do this first one on camera okay so to get the CPU out it looks like we have this fan to start with and then [Music] the heat sink in the socket here so imagine these two screws have to come out as well so okay let's just get started with these the old fan screws so far I've been able to take everything apart in this system with very minimal screws um [Music] very much minimal few screws and all of them have been the Phillips um two head screws which has been really great and Lenovo doesn't do everything perfect all the time but at least with this system well I guess I'm working on three that are dead so maybe it's not the best system but I don't think I can fault Lenovo for that at this point but yeah everything has been fairly easy to take a part and work on so I love that it makes my job so much easier okay I think we can take this fan um okay yeah so I was really cleaning this I take everything out and probably clean stuff but really I got four screws on the socket so I'm gonna take these off in a bit of a star pattern just to make sure tension is good [Music] and this is going to be our test bed test system where we're going to drop CPUs in so should be able to this thermal paste might be a bit crusty I bet I can kind of Leverage this heat pint to be all out of the socket [Music] yeah let's see if I can kind of wiggle this a bit break some of that thermal paste up I want to yank the CPU is actually something that can happen with aim for can the CPU come out of the socket on these I know the am3 that was like a big common thing okay [Music] I think [Music] come on yeah okay oh wow this thermal paste is actually pretty new looking it's not bad I wonder if uh seems like someone might have worked on this it makes sense because there's aftermarket memory in there so it makes sense that someone would work on this um kind of a bummer if they tossed in new memory and just didn't realize that one of their dims was was busted um yeah I'm gonna get this I forgot to get thermal paste stuff I'll be right back okay I'm back with isopropyl alcohol try to rip this under the table so it's not so loud on Mike I'm a big fan of using coffee filters for uh getting CPU thermal paste off they're a little bit more porous so I feel like they kind of catch on to a lot of the thermal paste and they're fairly affordable you can find them pretty cheap and you can also find ones that are made from like recycled materials pretty easily and another cool perk is that you can use one of them if you have these kind of flat kind you can use one of them as a little like trash bin while you're working I'm kind of doing a quick and dirty job here because I'm just swapping out CPUs to test them out this won't be the final on any of these I'll probably have to redo the thermal paste again when I actually finish up on this job it's a job like I'm a tech repair person just LARPing as a computer repair person seems like it'd be fun if I really knew what I was doing okay clean enough I grabbed all this stuff to clean off thermal paste and forgot to actually grab the craft at least so I'll be right back thank goodness for editing right okay so we should be able to pop this out foreign never actually got to mess with a 2400 G or a 2400 GE which is uh what this is which I'm pretty sure is slightly lower clocked maybe I'm actually not sure I looked into this a little bit ago but it's been a while since I I pulled this up so all right I'm gonna set this off to the side this is our known good CPU thermal paste on my fingers probably gonna do a quick and dirty job getting these CPUs out I probably won't even worry about thermal paste on them very much I'll probably just try to get them out and get them dropped into the system as quickly as I can foreign [Music] cleaning up this socket or the CPU because I'm really just trying to test to see if this works so I'm just going to be lazy pick this up out of the socket drop it in this socket pinch it down and then I'm probably just going to put a tiny little bit of thermal paste on here I'm not going to run it like this I'm just going to see if it posts if it posts great I know that well if it doesn't post then I know that the CPU is probably bad in which case I don't really care about the thermal paste so if it does post then I know I have two good CPUs and something's up with this motherboard I'm just gonna filling this back together really quick [Music] all right that's it I'm not even going to screw the fan back in because I'm going to be taking this back apart I just made sure I put tension on the CPU and let's see this guy fires up [Music] I don't know if oh my camera battery died hold on okay my camera died it's back up now but this is interesting um no post here I wasn't expecting this honestly um I've rarely ever had CPUs die on me so not what I was expecting um not what I was expecting at all so this is the good system that CPU didn't post so I'm going to keep that CPU in there right now stuff's starting to kind of get messy now I'm gonna drop a good CPU in here that's not the right way I might double check on that one that I got the CPU socketed correctly because maybe maybe I didn't these mounts are a little funky so maybe I did something wrong didn't get it socketed good what we'll do is we'll toss on this guy so known working CPU put some non-working Ram in here and see if we can get this little guy to boot up if so then that pretty much means we've got a dead CPU [Music] we've got non-working CPU known working RAM and a non-known or the king motherboard see what we get bummer okay um something I'd think to do is I think I might try clearing the CMOS I'm going to double check how I do that really quick give me just a second okay so I think I put this jumper one on these two pins then I want to say I just hold the power button down oh I don't know why I thought I had to hold the button down okay so I believe that just cleared CMOS shut it back down I can't replace the CMOS battery too I don't think that would be the problem but we'll probably do a lot of things just to try to be sure this back in the right spot let's try booting it up again okay so this clearly wasn't just a dead CPU um something's still up with this motherboard it seems like but I'm going to try to figure out why the other one with the unknown CPU didn't post because that seems odd so I'm gonna turn this guy back off so this has a known working CPU in it we'll just plug this back in I'm gonna try clearing CMOS on this one since I replaced the CPU just to make sure foreign okay so that didn't work this jumper bad so I'm not getting a little clear cmosphere oh my gosh this is a mess I'm gonna get rid of their little jumper and use a different one should be getting some beeps here I'm not so weird so weird okay not sure what that's about this is the system that was working which is strange okay oh my gosh I'm gonna put this CPU back in here and just make sure I get this working system posted because this is making me sad well we're back I did a few things off camera just because I didn't want this video to drag on way too long so um right now we have system number one I believe oh this is just number two apologies okay so just a little refresher assistant number three was the one that only had a bad stick of ram so CPU is good motherboard was good one dim was good and then all of our other memory we tested was good on the other systems so on system one I tried swapping the CPUs from system 3 and system one so known good CPU into non-working board and unknown CPU into working board and neither of them posted so it could be an issue with the CPU and number one but it wasn't the only issue because the board wouldn't post with a good CPM so uh I also swapped the CPU from this board which this is number two yeah this is number two I swapped the CPU from number two into number three and it booted that time so system three and system two both had good CPUs system one is questionable um because it didn't post another system but I don't want to just write it off yet um and this is system two like I said this also has now a known working good CPU in it and turns out a CPU and it was working anyway so not sure I tried clearing CMOS on all these I haven't replaced the CMOS battery here just for for good measure and we're still not getting anything so at this point this machine seems like the best bet because I at least know we have a good CPU in there and I know we have a good stick of ram good CPU and good stick of ram but ah man I'm not really sure at this point there's I mean there's a lot of things that could be on the motherboard it could be a bad um it can be a bad bad DisplayPort or anything because the fan would spin down once it posted to a different display could be a corrupted bios which I'm yeah I'm not sure it could be corrupted by us on here I do have a bioship reprogrammer that I actually bought a long time ago before I fixed that motherboard I was talking about previously um I can't think of what it what it is um so we could try reprogramming the BIOS chips on here with a like flash a new bios direct end of the chip I could mess around with that I think I might give that a shot yeah I think I'm going to give that a shot this might wrap it up for this one though so if so thanks for watching stay curious and I hope okay so actually I'm back uh I thought this was going to be a part two but um doesn't really make sense I don't think but I did a lot of it off camera because I realized trying to do it in person in real time was going to be really hard not having my mics positioned in the right spot and I can't really set up for it so I did some messing around and this right here is system number two the one that had a good CPU for sure but not good something on the motherboard and as I turn this on you should hopefully see it post it's gonna be really embarrassing if it doesn't so what I did was I messed yeah there we go F1 to enter setup we'll look at that look at that so what I did was I actually used this guy right here this is a bios reprogramming tool I'll have a link to it for it in the description and stuff but basically it's through a series of adapters all right here we go here so basically it's this guy and then there's this 1.8 volt adapter which is what the bios chip that's on here is this one it's a 1.8 volt chip um and so I was able to put this on and use this little clip to clip onto it so I clipped onto the BIOS chip and was able to like detect it using a program called neoprogrammer and I tried I thought about pulling the BIOS from lenovo's website but rather than throwing on a binary file that I really didn't know if it was the right thing I just decided to read and save the binary from the working bios chip and then I flashed it to this bios chip and boom we have working computer number two so two and three both work one does not work but um not entirely sure why so I am going to mess around with flashing the first computer as well and then we'll maybe have to swap the CPU over to see to see what happens there but um yeah so number two is now working it just has a fresh bios on there and yeah foreign okay well I was not expecting this to work sorry I'm kind of jumping in and jumping out I went ahead and just gave it a shot and through the the working bios binary onto this guy which is I don't have my top down camera oops but this is computer number one the one that I didn't even know if the CPU worked and boom it works so we have three working computers right now the only thing we're missing is one stick of ddr4 um sodium for the computer number three um ironically the only computer that doesn't work fully is the first one that got working but it's all three of them work we just need um to replace this busted dim and then I need two more power adapters because I only have one but after that we'll have three working computers so I'm gonna look up I'll probably throw on some numbers up here of how much it's going to cost to order those parts and then once I have them yeah I'll kind of figure out how much I ended up spending and hopefully I'll be able to use these for some fun videos and maybe sell them and make a little bit of a profit so yeah I did not I did not expect that last one to work I was I had some cautious optimism with the second computer um and but yeah I was not expecting this one to work so yay that was a very pleasant surprise and um yeah I think that is officially about it for this video because the only thing there is really left to do is go clean up all the thermal paste um because I really need to to do that and then put these all back together and order some parts so I was gonna ask for help but I think I figured it out which is that's new that's new on this channel usually I I don't figure it out so uh yeah I think that's about it um I guess I could say if you want to support the channel and make things like this more possible because dropping 200 on computers that don't work is not the easiest and cheapest thing to do so if you want to support the channel um you can you know give as little as a dollar a month on my patreon to get some exclusives some behind the scenes stuff and early access to my videos and yeah thank you guys so much for watching this far I know it's been it's probably dragged on for a bit so thank you for watching dealing with the horrible lighting and uh stay curious and I hope to see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 350,838

Keywords: lenovo m715q, ryzen 2400ge pro, tech repair, pc repair, board level repair, corrupt bios repair, bios reprogramming, mini pc, mini pc repair, computer repair, pc deals, good deals on pcs, good deals on pc parts

Id: Se7R8di_h7I

Length: 39min 24sec (2364 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023