I Paid $2500 for 5 BROKEN High End Laptops - But Can I Fix Them?!

i paid two thousand five hundred dollars for these broken laptops now it's time to see if i can fix them this razer laptop was worth over three thousand dollars when it was new so we'll save that one for last and start with this razer laptop let's open it up see if it turns on and see what's all wrong this video is sponsored by the ridge wallet more on them in a minute so let's see what happens when we press the power button oh we do have a green light that's well it did oh yeah there it is okay got something on the screen that's good news windows could not complete the installation to install windows on this computer restart the installation i think this would be a great time for me to mention that i have very little experience with software i'm more of a hardware guy myself so this should get interesting oh wait here we go uh we got an error code that's actually good that gives me something to go off of so you'll need to use recovery tools so before i take the back off of this thing i'm going to get a usb stick with windows on it and try and install windows that way okay let's see if this works i have no idea if i did all that right but it is installing it looks like so i'm just gonna let this install and we'll see what happens i am a hundred percent sure there's a better way to do this but what i'm doing is at least working okay so this is the first problem i see since i've reinstalled windows it doesn't show any networks here so i'm gonna keep going and hopefully we'll be able to figure that out along the way and here we go good so far okay let's check out this internet problem yeah it doesn't even see internet okay did not detect a properly installed network adapter let's see if it thinks there's any network adapters okay it thinks all of this is here so it has a bluetooth problem here which is interesting oh here we go let's do a network reset nope and now we're reinstalling windows yet again this time it seems like it's actually taking a little bit longer so i'm hopeful that maybe it's installing everything that it needs it is also possible that there's just a problem with the hardware on this i'm hoping that's the problem because i really want to open this thing up and here we go it just found my network this is great news okay and this all looks great we are connected to the internet and i don't see any other problems with this i will test this a little bit more off camera but it looks like this razor is fully fixed let's move on to this hp spectre 360. i'm not sure how to turn this on oh there we go got something on the screen now this one i've already got shut up so this one i've already got set up i wanted to save some time in the video by making sure windows was all pre-installed so the one thing i wanted to check on this is the charging system we get 19.7 volts and 1.29 amps which is great now it's fully powered off let's see if it charges now okay and it does charge now so the reason i sound a little surprised is i did try and charge all of these laptops up before the video started just so then i didn't have to do that in the video and this one wasn't charging when it was turned off clearly now it is i'm thinking the battery was just fully charged when i tried to do that test so now i need to test and see if there's anything else i noticed that is wrong with this one after this is fully updated i'm going to test it more off camera and i'll come back to it if i find anything interesting let's move on to one of the larger laptops this acer nitro 5 i know for sure there's something wrong with this one so let's check it out but before we do that let's talk about the sponsor today's video the ridge wallet the ridge wallet has over 30 colors and styles including carbon fiber and burnt titanium these wallets are so high quality that there's over 40 000 five-star reviews and even better you can test drive them for free for 45 days if you don't like it after 45 days you can return it for a full refund this wallet is one of my new favorites that ridge sells and it's a topographic map of half dome another thing i love about ridge is they sell upgrade kits for any wallet available right on their website and speaking of their website you can go to my link in the description ridge.comtronixfix and use codetronixfix for 10 off your order now is a great time to get a ridge wallet for you or as a gift for someone else now let's get to this acer nitro 5 and see if we can figure out what's wrong we do have power that's good news now i've actually already checked this computer and i'll show you what the problem is so if i'm going to enter a password and i go to press the t key nothing happens y works u does not work i works o works p does not work so we've got a problem with the keyboard i'm pretty sure the only thing that could be going on is something internally so i think we finally have a laptop that we need to take apart okay any sign of liquid damage now i've just been looking at the board a little bit closer and i think i might have found the issue so look closely at everything you can see and see if you can spot what i spotted if you look very closely this is the ribbon cable for the keyboard this tab is locked fully in this tab however is not that means that the connection between this ribbon cable and these pins that go to the board is probably not very good so i'm going to go ahead and just push the cable in lock this tab fully there we go make sure both of them are fully pushed down and now let's see if that keyboard works okay and this is the test does the t work oh no it still doesn't work i thought for sure that was gonna fix it okay well back to the drawing board on this one now as i'm looking at this area again i noticed a very similar thing right here on this connection right here this locking tab is also not locked i'm actually going to unlock this reseat the cable and then make sure it is fully locked to do that i'm going to need to remove this battery so i can get to this ribbon cable right here and then i'm also going to reseat this one as well you see this white line right here usually that should be a little closer to this connector so let's try those things and then see if that'll work okay now we can push this cable all the way in there we go that one is all the way in now and fully seated now let's do the same with this one okay so that white line is actually where it needs to be you can feel when this ribbon cable kind of bottoms out in the connector so that locking tab is fully down so we should be good there okay so what do you think you think that'll fix it let's find out come on work oh no i was hoping that was going to be a quick easy fix but clearly it's not going to be and i see absolutely no liquid damage at all on the bottom side of this board and no evidence of liquid damage right here on the bottom side of the keyboard either so back in with the motherboard so i actually just went ahead and reinstalled windows just to make sure that there wasn't a problem with the installation or anything like that so now let's check and see if we have these buttons working let's start with t come on no so i think at this point we just need to buy a new keyboard i think it's probably the keyboard i've tried everything i know to do software wise so i think really the only thing that's left is the keyboard itself now i don't have that part here yet so let's move on to the lenovo laptop once i get the part then we'll come back to this one and here we have a lenovo yoga c740 let's see if it turns on i know how to turn it on oh button on the side okay no power at all on this one let's plug it into a charger and see what happens we've got 19 volts and 0.85.88 amps now let's try and power it on we've got a flashing power button oh here we go and it's charging at 1.48 amps now i actually tested this one before i started the video and the power button would come on but then it would just power right back off so this is actually great news it does seem to be staying on so let's get windows installed and see what happens now as i'm looking at this one i see a dent here and [Applause] a dent right on the other side as well so it is possible that the reason this one is put in the salvage box that i bought is because of these dents also similar thing right up here on the top case and right over here so this one might actually work fine and it could be just because there's dents here so far absolutely no problems other than those dents on the case that i've shown already and after getting this lenovo yoga all set up and doing some basic tests on it i see no problems i'll test it a little bit more off camera but for now i'm going to consider this one as one that didn't really need anything fixed i think the dents on the case are the reason this was in with the salvage box so i think now it's time to move over to the 17-inch razor now before we get doing anything too crazy on this one i want to remove this bottom cover because it is missing two screws here none over here this one's loose but all the rest look like they're here but it's missing these ones so i want to just open this up and make sure all the parts are there and there are no obvious problems and let's face it i mean i do just want to open it up too okay and let's see what it looks like on the inside wow that is very dirty look at that i mean these heat sinks got to be just totally plugged under here other than that the good news is i don't see any liquid damage or any other issues except for here is one of the screws it's a good thing i took this bottom case off the screw rattling around here could have touched some points and caused some major issues let's see if there are any more in here oh got another one okay i think and i hope we got them all now let's get this cleaning done wow look at this this is insane i've done very few laptop repairs but this is definitely the most plugged laptop heatsink i've ever seen no wonder this thing was considered salvaged look at that let's check the other one yep look at that there's no question this laptop had a serious overheating issue i actually want to make sure this all gets cleaned out that's the keyboard right under there so i got to make sure that none of this gets stuck down in there even though it looks like it already is so it wouldn't surprise me if this one is also having a keyboard issue it's okay everything's gonna be okay so all of this came out of just those two heatsinks i bet you're gonna go clean your laptop after this video so for any of you wondering where i got this lot of computers i bought it from a website that sells liquidation goods from major retailers [Music] and guess what i just found yep another screw we got some dust right there dust down here also have quite a bit of dust right here so we do need to give this a good cleaning and then we need to replace this thermal paste and we can get that heat sink back on the rest of it fully cleaned then we can put the motherboard in and see if it actually works i think you know what time it is it's time to install the perfect amount of thermal paste because we know that's the real problem here there we go now we can put it all back together and with the perfect amount of thermal paste we can be sure that it's going to start right up so if you look closely here you can even see this dust and lint and hair all the way on the top side of the keyboard just because it was so packed with dirt in there okay there's definitely more i could do but i want to try and get this thing started up i can do that later oh i see oh yeah here we go good good account has been disabled i have no mouse okay so that's going to be the next thing we have to figure out oh we do have a touch display that's cool let's go ahead and try a restart hey it actually let me in okay so since this seems to have an administrator password i think what i want to do since we actually are in is try and just reinstall windows into this laptop but right now this mouse isn't working so i got to look at that first and then let's just reinstall windows and see if we can get a fresh install on this thing and that was pretty easy to find the problem with the mouse at least i'm assuming that's what it is now i have windows fully installed the mouse is working now that it's plugged in and it's running at a cool 46 degrees celsius when it's just here at idle so this razer laptop is fixed but we got to go back to that lenovo we looked at earlier because i just noticed another problem so before when i had this plugged in it seemed to be charging and working perfectly normally then i pulled the charger out and put it back in and this is what happens we just get a flash on the charger and that's it so i'm gonna first try and turn it on and let's see if that changes okay so this all looks good but we only have 30 on the battery so let's try and plug this in now that it is started up we get the same thing so i think that's justification enough to open it up let's get this back off and see what it looks like on the inside and with that back cover off the first thing i notice is i mean first of all this humongous lithium-ion battery but second of all i see no liquid damage or any other sort of damage on this computer so the first thing i'm going to do is disconnect the battery and then i'll just reconnect it and try and charge it again and see if that changes anything let's see what happens when we try and plug it in without the battery plugged in okay actually is charging normally without the battery see what happens when we plug the battery back in could just have a faulty battery here okay so the battery is the first thing i suspect there's got to be some sort of charge controller that determines whether it's using ac power or battery power and i'm wondering if that could possibly be faulty it's also strange how it worked fine for a while and then after i unplugged it and plugged it back in then it stopped working again let's check the battery driver there we go batteries this device is working properly let's try and update the driver now i will re-enable it now let's see if that will get our charger to work and same thing so at this point i don't think we have a software issue i think it's probably got to be a hardware issue with the battery but i don't know of any good way to test that so next i'm going to look up and see if i can figure out where on this board the battery charger controller is and see if we can do any basic tests on that at least see if there is any shorts on it or anything i'm also gonna look over this with a thermal camera and just see if there's anything that's getting super hot okay now with that setup let's plug it in and see what happens let's see there's a significant warm spot there so 107 which is pretty warm it's kind of right under these connectors right here so let's take this network card off and check all these little components around here and see if we can figure out what exactly is causing it to heat up like that it's not like it's super hot but it is warm enough that it kind of makes me wonder if there's anything going on there so we possibly have a problem right down here in one of these little guys it also could be something coming from the other side of the board i'm gonna get in and check some of these little components right here and see if we have any obvious shorts the other thing i notice is it looks like somebody has had this board out looks like there used to be some sort of warranty sticker here and that screw has also been tampered with it looks like same with this one so now i was just inspecting this usbc charge port and i noticed what looks like a little problem right here so you can see part of the circuit right here this this line goes back here but it doesn't actually connect right here onto this pin so i'm wondering if maybe that's the only issue we have here i think the first thing we need to do is solder a wire from here onto this trace somewhere and then we'll see if that'll work okay and now that that's fixed let's give it a test and see what it does now we have the battery plugged in we have this little circuit fixed let's see what happens come on ah no this little component right here could be causing a problem but it also could be something on the other side of this board so i think what i want to do is just get this board out so i can check the other side of the board and just make sure there's nothing obvious going on there and this just shows that obviously someone's already been in here trying to fix this board as this chip has fresh new thermal paste even though they didn't clean off all the old thermal paste and there we go oh yeah somebody's been into this one this bottom metal piece says crease is all over it's all kinked up over here let's see what we're getting ourselves into it actually doesn't look too bad so there's really not much going on on the back side of this board there's these little components over here i already checked those and those are all fine so we go back to this guy right here so let's check this one out and just see if there's anything obvious going on on it now in the process of looking at this little lj component i found something very interesting i found the controller and it is this guy right here and i noticed that it has some very interesting solder joints if you look right along the solder joints you can see a lot of them aren't even connected to the pads so what i'm going to do to fix this is just put some flux on all these pads and then bring my small micro pencil soldering iron along here touch up all these pads to make sure they're in good connection between the chip and the board now we have all these pins correctly aligned and soldered on if you notice these two pins have a bridge that doesn't matter because they're both connected to the same pad now that's all cleaned we do have one other issue to worry about and that is this little chip right here this is the one that gets warm it doesn't get like super warm but it definitely gets way hotter than anything around it so since i can't find this chip anywhere there's only two markings on it and i don't know where to find it since there is another one of these chips right here first what i'm going to do is remove this chip see if it charges and then if it does not charge then i'm going to take the other chip from the other port and put it on right up here let's plug it into the charger and see if that happened to fix it come on ah no let's plug it in and see if it charges no doing the same thing as before so i was able to find the data sheet for the usbc controller so let's do a little bit of testing here i want to see if we have ac power in and then i also want to see if this controller is making the power for the rest of the board like this 3v3 right here and this 3v3 right here so the first thing we need to check is to see if we have ac power in so that is pin number six and pin number ten so we have one two three four five six two point nine volts seven eight nine ten and two point nine volts as far as i know that's accurate i don't have a number for acn let's check number five which is a three v three out one two three four five three point three volts and number nine six seven eight nine and three point three volts let's just go ahead and check the v bus on 13 and 14 and there we have 20 volts so based on that testing this chip unless there's something i'm missing this chip seems to be doing its job it's taking voltage in and putting voltage out on the correct pins and after looking at the numbers on this chip this is our charge controller and this is the pin out for anyone that's interested and with our black probe on ground let's check for a v bus 19.9 let's check for input voltage 19.9 and 19.9 so by checking this charge controller i've learned that it does get voltage from the usb-c port when you have the usb-c cable plugged in it also does see the battery in the battery voltage when it's plugged in now the hard part is that i don't have a schematic for the rest of this board so i can test the few pins that i know to test on this chip but without a schematic telling me where the other components are that i need to be testing that are in line with this charge circuit there's just really not much more i can do unfortunately so then i asked myself the question should i replace the battery on this i did look up on ebay and i can get a used battery just like this for 15 bucks so i'm gonna get that i don't like to just buy parts and throw parts at something but in this case i don't have a lot of other options because i can only test so many things without a full schematic i really hope this works after all that stuff i've done to the motherboard all the testing we've done unfortunately we're kind of up against a wall since we have no schematics let's plug it in and see what happens oh same thing oh look at this it's actually charging now so i unplugged the battery and then just plugged it in when it was on and now it's charging that is weird while i let this one charge let's get back to that acer nitro 5 the keyboard has come in so let's get that replaced and see if that fixes that one so i'm just going to start pressing from over here and just go all the way across and every single key works just fine so this acer nitro 5 is totally fixed obviously i do have to set it up and test it some more for anything else that's wrong but the keyboard part is definitely fixed so it's still charging at 1.5 amps 19.7 volts so i think next what i'm going to do is unplug this and plug it back in several times and just see if it keeps charging how it should so even though this thing is currently charging and i like to see that i'm going to unplug the charger because i want to see if it's going to keep charging when i plug it back in no it is not so let's try what we did before let's unplug the battery and then plug the battery back in and now it's charging now i know i've got a lot of really smart people that watch my videos so if you think you know what the problem is put them down in the comments below and if i see some good ideas down there that i can try maybe i'll make an update video let me know down in the comments if you want to see an update video also if you like this type of video you'll probably like the video where i bought a gaming laptop that was destroyed by a repair shop and i tried to fix it i'll put the link for that right up on your screen now so you can come hang out with me over there and see if i was able to fix it if you're looking to upgrade your wallet game i recommend a ridge wallet go to ridge.com tronixfix and use my codetronixfix for 10 off your order thank you so much for watching and i hope you have a good one

Channel: TronicsFix

Views: 3,684,770

Keywords: tronicsfix, tronicsfix steve, broken laptop, broken laptop lot, tronicsfix broken laptops

Id: B3ZONl7I8OE

Length: 24min 35sec (1475 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021