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    #33101
    Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

    Hello everyone

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      #33102
      Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

      Hi everyone! I am a medical researcher and enjoy electronics and tinkering as a hobby. I have recently started purchasing old and decommissioned computers to play around with and found this site while trying to troubleshoot some issues I've been having. I'm really looking forward to learning more.

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        #33103
        Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

        Hello, My name is Simon and I am living in Warsaw, Poland. I am on first steps in fixing electronics with some first successes on my account. And i want to understand a little more how i fixed those things

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          #33104
          Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

          Hi to everyone. New member from Spain here.

          Comment

            #33105
            Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

            hello everyone. im Magnus from brazil.

            Comment

              #33106
              Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

              Hello thanks for adding me to badcaps forum. I am a newbie so please be nice to me

              Comment

                #33107
                Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                hello

                Comment

                  #33108
                  Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                  Hey there, badcaps.net fam!

                  So, I snagged a laptop from an online seller, but the BIOS is locked. I've been googling about and it has lead me here.

                  I know BIOS unlocking can be a tricky process, but I'm determined to figure it out. That's why I'm here, hoping to get some guidance from the experts on this forum.

                  Thanks for your time, and I'm stoked to learn from all of you.

                  Peace out!

                  Comment

                    #33109
                    It's gonna be a long message, you've been warned

                    Hello everyone!

                    Glad to be a part of this community.

                    And for those of you curious, a little bit of backstory about how I ended up here...

                    I've been using my laptop (which I got as a gift btw), an Acer E1-571
                    • i3-2328M (2C/4T)
                    • 6GB DDR3 RAM (4GB+2GB)
                    • 500GB SATA HDD

                    since the end of 2012 and it has served me pretty well... for basic stuff: studying, browsing the web, etc. I like videogames, but gaming on the embedded Intel HD 3000 is not ideal, to say the least.

                    At the end of 2022 I started searching for an upgrade and found the Gigabyte Aero 15X v8
                    • i7-8750H (6C/12T)
                    • 16GB DDR4 RAM (2x8GB)
                    • GTX 1070 Max-Q (8GB)
                    • 512GB NVMe 3.0 SSD

                    on eBay for a price that I could afford (I've been saving money for quite some time) and went for it.

                    When the laptop arrived I turned it on to see that it actually works and all went fine. It seems like the previous owner had a cat as a pet, because the ventilation grills on the bottom had accumulated a lot of fur. So I decided to clean it. I've done this before with my previous laptop. What could go wrong, right? Wrong! Not with my luck, anyway. So I took the bottom panel off and spent some time cleaning the grills with tweezers, didn't really touch anything on the PCB and the battery was unplugged.

                    When the cleaning part was done I connected back the battery, assembled everything, pushed the power button aaaaand... nothing happened.

                    It was at this moment that I knew — I f'd up.

                    My soul had left my body for a split second and when it returned I started checking that everything was connected properly, even though I didn't disconnect anything other than the battery. After a few hours watching at the front side of the motherboard, which was still screwed to the chassis, I decided that I should unscrew it and check the other side.

                    First thing that I found was a completely blown cap, that is part of the GPU circuit, which left a pretty big burn mark on the insulating plastic between the keyboard and the motherboard (this point is important), although I didn't smell anything burnt when powering on after the reassembly. How do I know that this cap belongs to the GPU circuit? I found a boardview and a complete schematic for my board (GA-RP65X8, send me a PM if you need it). I took the motherboard to a local repair shop and the guy desoldered the cap and told me to test if this fix worked. It didn't.

                    Second thing that I found after some more inspection is another mark on the insulating plastic, although a smaller one, which meant that some other component was producing too much heat. Mind you, that this is the backside of the PCB, so there are no components there that produce significant amount of heat by design. Using a ruler and the big burn mark as the starting point, I measured the distance between the two and searched in that radius on the PCB. That led me to one of the corners of the EC chip (IT8587E). When looking at this chip at an angle I could see that the surface of that corner had a different tone than the rest of the surface of the chip, which led me to think that the chip was indeed bad.

                    So I went to a repair shop (again) to ask how much would it cost to repair it and it was ≈1/3 of the price of the laptop. Funny thing though: when I showed a close up photo of the chip to the guy, he asked "Is that a sound chip or something?" That was a red flag for me.

                    And then I started a crusade to fix my laptop myself. Watched a ton of repair videos on YouTube, got myself a soldering iron (it's a pita to desolder EC, but can't afford hot air atm, I'm using low melt solder), a stereo microscope (must have), a multimeter and all the other stuff. I did all of this to learn something new and to, maybe, at some point start doing this for a living. We'll see...

                    I already replaced the EC with a new one without programming it (because I don't have a programmer... yet) with the hopes that it would work ('cause some people said that it could pull the firmware from the BIOS chip), got some signs of life, but still didn't boot. So rn I'm in the process of ordering a preprogrammed chip with a firmware that's compatible with my BIOS version. I even learned how to extract the EC firmware (at least for the ITE) from the BIOS file using a HEX editor.

                    And that's basically it. I will post an update soon, hopefully with a working laptop. Fingers crossed. Cheers to those of you who made it to this point.

                    Have a good day.

                    See ya

                    Comment

                      #33110
                      Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                      Well hello, I go by Albino/Dope on most places. I've been doing mostly networking and A+ for the past 6ish years, and am now getting into soldering, I would love to make the jump into microsoldering so currently I'm studying basic electrical engineering. I've a case of the ADHD so reading comprehension is probably my weakest skill but when you add pictures to everything it makes it alot easier. A very good friend of mine suggested checking this forum out and so far everything I've studied from here has been really really helpful in learning.

                      Some personal information is that I'm a passionate futbol fan, with an equal love for music. I'm a bit slow to be social and unfortunately behind a screen doesn't really seem to change that. While I can talk endlessly about the latest LaLiga game I would struggle to introduce myself.

                      I hope this will be a timestamp to reflect on the changes I've made in the years to come.

                      Comment

                        #33111
                        Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                        Hello to everybody, from Rhodes isl.
                        I'm glad to be (& reading) here.

                        Comment

                          #33112
                          Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                          Hello jeanberoa from Madagascar, welcome to our tech website! It's great to have a fellow technology enthusiast like you here. hope I'll enjoy exploring badcaps's content and learning new things about the exciting world of tech.

                          Comment

                            #33113
                            Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                            Hello,

                            I am new to this forum and just started fixing lcd tvs as a hobby. Found this site very useful.

                            Comment

                              #33114
                              Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                              Hello everyone

                              Comment

                                #33115
                                Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                                Hello all, am here to read some information about flashing! Thanks!

                                Comment

                                  #33116
                                  Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                                  Hello!! Im new here

                                  Comment

                                    #33117
                                    Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                                    Hello

                                    Comment

                                      #33118
                                      Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                                      Hi

                                      Comment

                                        #33119
                                        Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                                        Hi everyone.
                                        My name is sumdog, name taken from the school app, as I need to help my little granddaughter to achieve some skills on computing. Not remarkable achievements from my side except flashing some phones , and resetting to factory a Zebra Mobile Computer.
                                        I like to "dig" for what I need and right now it looks that I have found a golden mine.
                                        Well, it's all about helping each other ,are we ?

                                        Comment

                                          #33120
                                          Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

                                          Old guy here - It is SUCH a great pleasure to find a true tech BBS again. I thought they had all disappeared. in the 1990's we used dialup to access sites like this... Thanks to the administrators for keeping this alive.

                                          Comment

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