What is Reflow?
When a laptop “dies” many times it is caused by the overheating of the components on the mother board. Most of the time the first thing to overheat is the graphics chip.
Basically what happens is that solder, which is used to make electronic connections inside and around the chip, cracks and becomes separated from the components.
Symptoms of this most of the time will be:
-that laptop will no longer turn on.
-Sometimes the laptop lights will turn on, sometimes not, but nothing else happens.
-Sometimes the hard drive will fire up but the screen will simply not turn on.
-Sometimes “artifacts” or weird symbols will show up randomly on the laptops monitor if the monitor turns on
Ruling out other problems like a faulty hard drive or a dead battery, if your laptop shows any of these symptoms, it may have overheated. If your laptop is not on warranty most computer stores will charge you $400 and upward to have the motherboard replaced.
Reflow is a method where the mother board is completely removed from the laptop casing (and connections) and then the video chip is heated to a high temperature in order for the solder to reseat itself in and around the chip.
A reflow station is usually a temperature controlled heat gun made especially for soldering electronic components together.
Before the chip is “reflowed” the thermal paste which is used to allow the heat to move from the processor and video card chip is completely removed and cleaned with alcohol wipe. Then the processor chip is removed. After the video chip is “reflowed” and the processor is reseated, new thermal paste is reapplied. In many cases laptops are sold without a proper heat sink design and can be improved by the addition of a thin plate of copper in-between the video chip and heat sink. Many times this addition of copper to the heat sink can keep your temperatures much lower during heavy cpu and video card loads. There are some cases on the internet of the average laptop temperatures dropping 40-50 degrees.
Our Reflow Service
With the reflow process:
-I will determine if your laptop is a candidate for reflowing.
-I will not charge you if the method does not work.
-I will also check to see if heat sink can be improved
-Cleaning the fans and the inside of the unit is part of the process
So, do you have a laptop or a video card you were thinking about throwing out or selling for parts?
I charge $125.00 for laptops if I can fix it.
$50.00 for removable video cards which fail for the same reason
If it doesn’t work I will put your computer back together so it is the same way you gave it to me and not charge you.
I will also give a 7 day money back guarantee if the laptop fails again within that period.
Every laptop I have reflowed has been successful so far.
Located in Edmonton, please contact me using the contact page; or check out my add on Kijiji!
Causes overheated laptop failure can be:
-simply from watching movies or playing games over long periods so the chip overheats with an improper heat sink
-thermal paste which is used to transfer the heat from the video chip and microprocessor can get hard and crack over time if the laptop is jarred in some way or it may just separate.
-in some cases the fans may have been impeded in some way, either from dust or not functioning properly. (If your fan is not working properly I can probably get a new one for you and install it for a small fee.)
Copyright © 2012 Boyar
