Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it’s a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn’t an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.
It has a 1.8GHz Pentium CPU and an nVidia 6800Go video card. Not long after I bought it, the video card failed. I blogged about the issue and the rubbish Dell Support.
Well, it happened again just after the warranty ran out. Convenient, huh? Exactly the same problem as previously happened – corruption on the screen indicating hardware failure. I contacted Dell and they basically said they couldn’t help, but if I wanted they would sell me a new video card for £200. I was torn and frustrated. I could get a cheap entire laptop for not much more than that, but not one with a decent 3D card and 17″ 1920×1200 display. I was irritated that they couldn’t see that this was a recurrent issue with the machine which made me less inclined to pay more money to them.
Whilst on the phone the guy asked me at the end if I was ‘satisfied’ with the support. I said ‘no’ of course which he was surprised at and after trying to argue that I should change my mind, he forwarded me on to his manager. The manager then proceeded to argue that I should change my answer to ‘yes’ because the agent had provided me with the correct answer – which was that he couldn’t help me. I was pretty peeved by this point that someone asked for my opinion of whether the transaction was a success and when I voiced displeasure, was badgered for a further 20 minutes to change my mind. I didn’t.
So since then (October last year) my dell laptop has sat in a drawer, unused, wasted. I have jumped on ebay now and then to try and get hold of a 2nd hand video card – it’s a modular MXM 6800Go – but never bought one. They’re quite rare and command similar prices to what Dell quoted me.
A few weeks ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his broken Playstation 3. He’d read threads online about how the fault he has may be a common one, where many online suggest slamming the motherboard in the oven for a bit to ‘reflow’ the solder. Many reports online say this works.
I was in one of those moods yesterday, and dug out the laptop and managed to figure out how to take the thing apart and get the video card out. I wound the oven up to 200 degrees C and put the card in for 9 minutes. I figured I had nothing else to lose. If all those posts online were a massive conspiracy to get thick people such as me to put delicate electronics into a hot oven then they succeeded!
30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.
So now, have I joined the ranks of the internet crazies who say putting electronics in the oven might cure it? Yup. Don’t do it though, because it might all go horribly wrong and I wouldn’t want you to blame me would I? 
36 Comments
I have a Linksys(Cisco) WRT54GL that I “accidentally” overclocked from 200Mhz to 216Mhz, and it refused to boot.
I wasn’t happy.
I went to the bread-bin, removed the loaf within, ate all the bread (well, what else could I do), put the WRT into the bread bag, ethernet and 12(?)vDC cable attached, and cable tied it closed, placed whole assembly into the chest freezer, ran the wires out the seal, and closed the door.
I waited 20minutes.
I turned on the plug.
IT BOOTED!
One quick SSH session later, clocking back to 200Mhz, and, um, *stops to count* 4 years on this blog-comment comes to you from wifi powered by the same Access Point
Sometimes (just sometimes) the most unorthodox solutions actually work
Nicely done on the lapdog, mental note stored away for when my PS3 eats its own tail
-Dx
You don’t mention that you ever removed it from the freezer..
Pretty similar to wrapping your RROD Xbox in a towel and popping it in an airing cupboard, just taken to a terrifying degree.
“degree”, nice.
I’ve now heard quite a few first person testimonials about putting electronics, video cards in particular, in the oven. Glad to hear of another oven re-flow story.
Did it with a crappy ATI laptop card, did nothing. Artifacts still there, X freezes up the machine. Will attempt again tomorrow because I hate being without a laptop (have been for 6 months now). Do you know if its safe to put the wholo mobo in? The connections could be broken, maybe…
No idea, sorry.
I may have to do it with my laptop too! This thing boots only when its hot.
the customer support people ask an imprecise question and expect a reasonable answer. If they asked “Did our CS person yell at your, scream at you, say rude things to you, lie to you or mislead you”, you could have said that they did not. But did the answer this person provide address the fact that they previously replaced a part that they realize was defective from the get-go and assumed would fail again leading to you having to replace it after the warranty expired? no. If they provided you with a reasonably working card that did not need replacing within the warranty period, they would have not need to replace the card and used up company resources (2 times). So if they just gave you the card saying that this was the last one, that would have lead to you being a happy customer but I expect if they did, the word would spread and they didn’t want to spend the money to help every other person in your situation kind of like a ‘car recall’. Its their choice.
I had a similar-ish problem recently too.
The graphics card on my Dell XPS M1530 died on me. I feared the worst phoning up Dell, having seen the price they charge for parts, and at first it wasn’t good… £300+ for a new motherboard, as the graphics card is integrated, and an extra £100ish to send out an engineer to replace. Of course there was no way i was paying that, and they knew it too. Eventually it turned out that for £120 I could get an engineer out the next day to change the motherboard/graphics cars for ‘free’, and I would also get 2 years of on site warranty included, in case anything else failed. Given it took the guy nearly an hour to do the job I feel it is a pretty good price all in all. And no more bills for 2 years, by which point I’ll no doubt be up for a new laptop.
glad to see such people like you with high electronic knowledge having some funny free time.
Wonder how you cook it: did you add some salt and water ?
So, now i know what to do when my hardware goes crazy: unplug all fans first, then if not enough, drop it into oven.
Thanks man, you are a star.
Haha, no salt and water. It might have tasted better but probably never worked again. I just placed it in a glass (i.e. non-conductive) dish on the middle shelf.
If you’re going to try this, it’s probably worth giving the oven a good scrub afterwards. There’s no telling what nasty fumes are released and you probably still want to use it for food afterwards.
If it works it works
In all seriousness if some breaks on me I mess about with it until I break it more. I just love playing with junk and seeing what I can do with it.
Putting it in the oven seems a bit extreme… Many people recommend using a heat gun to carefully blast the graphics chip, though I wasn’t brave enough when faced with this problem on an HP laptop. I ended up sending the machine to Reflow Repairs (http://www.reflowrepairs.co.uk/) who sorted it out for pretty reasonable money
System76 and ZaReason FTW.
My experiences with system76 have been excellent and I’ve heard ZaReason is the same.
Neither of whom ship to the UK (where I am).
ZaReason ships internationally…. oh bah I see. non-UK-Europe-only. Hrmph. Their website does say that if you live somewhere other than one of those countries to ask, though. There’s also the “get it shipped to one of your Europe-mainland friends and have them forward it to you” trick.
Ah yes, the old, ‘ship it to a friend in mainland Europe’ trick. That’s a great idea, as the majority of people in the UK do actually have friends who live a different country and speak a different language.
So, know I know exactly what to do when my electronics give up the ghost. Stuff them in the wood-burner and send a plea for help to Angela Merkel.
Well, I’m glad that’s sorted!
Haha. Well (rather predictably) I do have quite a few friends – “Internet Friends” as my mother in law calls them, who are in mainland Europe. I might be going to Belgium soon for the Ubuntu Developer Summit.
No! Must resist buying a new laptop! Must resist!
Widerstand ist zwecklos.
Aaaah, the joys of having proper SMT rework tools in the workshop
A lot of stuff is BGA which needs extremely specialised kit to remove, re-ball and solder in again. Roasting that in the oven is probably a safe bet if it’s going for scrap anyway. One thing that has stuck with me for a long time was a line from a Computer Shopper piece about some network cards damaged by lightning – “Well, I couldn’t make them work any less, just unlikely to ever work again…”
I was experiencing a similar problem with a Geforce 8800gtx, popped it in the oven for 10 minutes at gas mark 6 and is working fine now. Gives a whole new meaning to baked chips ;0)
War Operation Plan Response. I also had a machine named like this, long time ago. So long that it actually had a Digial VT-420 attached to it!
I would love to have an old Digital VT-100 (or the apparently superior) VT-101. I used one at college *mumble* years ago and loved it. We used to rock back on our high lab chairs with the coiled keyboard cable at full stretch. Happy days..
Hah!
I had a DEC VT05. Cobbled together from scrap parts and repaired by me. 300 baud was the greatest (after using a Teletype for three years…I often wonder how the resident of the room below felt about that)
Inspiron.
There’s your problem. Dell sells those to consumers. Expect to be taken advantage of. The stuff they sell to industry tends to be a bit more reliable (and repairable), as they would hear about it pretty quickly if it weren’t.
The Dell systems I have at home are all ex-commercial lease refurbs. They have never given me trouble.
Fair comment. The Latitudes I’ve had in the past have been pretty rock solid.
… and if bad comes to worse….. you still can use your microwave oven to finish it up… Great post and replies!
Most laptops run too hot. The XPS is no exception. Heat death of the various components is often the result.
Get a cooler that increases the airflow under the laptop considerably and you’ll find they’ll last longer.
I agree a cooler fan would help with this quite a bit. Also I do not believe that laptops were designed to be ran all the time like a desktop could. They were made to use briefly while away from home. One more opinion while I’m at it. NEVER cared for dell’s hardware reliability
Oh it has a fan, two in fact!
You may want to look for an updated BIOS too now it’s working. A friend had similar problems, and a run around from Dell until they finally sent him a new, different, graphics card for his just out of warranty model because he argued it was flawed in its initial design. He says “Dell have released an updated BIOS (Dec. 2009) to “Update thermal table for NVidia graphic” after telling me time and time again that they didn’t have a problem.”
Great idea. Sadly it doesn’t seem like my machine has an BIOS updates..
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&releaseid=R109316&SystemID=INS_PNT_P4_XPS_GEN2&servicetag=&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=8454&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=5&catid=&impid=&formatcnt=0&libid=1&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=142072
Nice URL.
This is similar to the old trick we used to get dead/damaged/noisy hard disks up and running long enough to get data off them.
When I was a systems manager, we used to take faulty drives, bag them up in a zip lock and shove them in the freezer for about two hours. Pull them out, plug them in and fire them up, and more often than not, they’d stay alive long enough to get the data onto the LAN or some other storage media. I’ve recovered some very critical data that way, usually from
idiotsusers who didn’t listen to me about storing their data on the LAN.One Trackback
[...] http://popey.com/blog/2006/07/20/Joined_up_Dell_support/, http://popey.com/blog/2010/03/08/roast-laptop/ My gorgeous (but massive) Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 has a problem. It locked up on me the other [...]