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[an error occurred while processing this directive] Laptop Computer Repairs Julie Fandrem of Santa Rosa (right here in Santa Rosa) found me through my Yellow Pages ad. She had two things she needed repaired. One was her 3rd generation iPod which needed a new battery, the other was her iBook. She came over and dropped off the iPod and brought her laptop. Through other means she had learned the logic board needed to be replaced. I replaced the battery in less than hour. The battery was $17 plus the $40 labor. For laptop... she had an original G3 500mhz iBook, replacing the logic board on that device would be silly. Instead I'm assisting her in finding a used MUCH better iBook, in fact I've sighted one for $600 that is 15 times the machine she had. I will migrating all her files over to it once we've gone to San Anselmo to buy the much better replacement. A good far better laptop was the better more effective choice to solve this problem. Replacing the logic board would have been the first step in a series a part failures in her machine leading to frustration and disappoinment. More on her machine when we get it here. Here she is with her fixed iPod. Gene Austin of Orange, California got a hold of me to repair to repair his Nano 1st generation which had a scroll wheel that was intermitently working. I've seen this before and the flakiness is typically not the scroll wheel but some oddity turned bad on the logic board. Through our email he comes to understand I know a lot more about computers than just iPods, (which is true.. I've worked in 8 hardware environments and 14 operatings systems at different times for different client solutions to tricky and technically challenging problems) and he asks if I can rebuild his Dell Inspiron 700M notebook computer. He describes the problem which I believe to be a data corruption/drive problem probably not associated with a hardware failure... but just in case I start to pull out the 700m manuals to give it further study and tell him to send it with the iPod. They arrive a few days later and after spending a couples of hours switching in good scroll wheels with no result and trying to isolate the intermit, I give up and call the time of death on his iPod. I turn my attention to the Windows XP Professional notebook that continues to get the "Blue Screen of Death" we've all seen before. I need to know if the data on the laptop is critical and call to ask. It's not and that leaves me the liberty to isolate and replace the the bad file on the drive or load a new version of the operating system on it if everything else about it checks out. There is one bad file in the operating system at boot that has bad permissions and I can't remove or replace because I don't have Admin level authority reachable on the machine. My choices are pull the drive out of the laptop and use an adapter to allow me to mount the drive as a sub-ordinate 'slave' on my PC which would then allow me remove and replace the file (which would be the approach if the data were life critical) or now that I know all the hardware for the notebook is good operating order to initialize the existing partition on the drive and load a new copy of the operating system. I choose to install a new version of the OS since I'm told this is likely to become a wireless notebook for a fellow workers child to use around the house. I set up a few things to make the notebook even more useful for anyone once I have the new OS back on it. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Back to Top

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