New Members - please post your introductions here

[upgradestations]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

hey all. Just found some useful info on one of the threads here and figured I'd stay awhile. Looking forward to seeing how I can interact and help out here.

I refurbish computers for a living, or, as it were, I create processes that make it easier for those who actually refurbish the computers to do so.

Thanks, already, for the info found here thus far! It helped me get past an annoying bios bug I was having on a specific laptop. So here's to where the search (for that, anyway) ended!

[ioankrill]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Thanks for accepting me
My name is Ioan im from Austria and I work with tv’s ( I remove only the Tuner)

[cotton]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello Guys, It is great being part of community.I am Database Admin by profession and repair my own and friends laptop as a hobby. From India , Delhi.

Thanks

[c.daniel]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello guys. I'm from Romania; excuse my very bad english. I'm here because i'm at a very beginning of laptop repair, and i want to learn. Thanks a lot for your support and info. Have a good day.

[DanielP]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Gday all. Just signed up. Live ion the South Coast of NSW, Australia.
Full time I work in healthcare fixing MRI, CT, ULS and NM systems
In my spare time I dabble in repairs and many other hobbies including Fishing.
Take care out there

[Мальцев]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Всем привет!
Рад присутствовать на этом форуме.

[arturd]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello Everyone
I'm maybe not new here because for long time I reading the forum. So now it is a time to say Hello.

I'm Artur and from a while ago started to repair electronics equipment as the hobby.

[OrangeLefty]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello everyone,

I'm Brian and I'm a heavy duty mechanic by trade - but I also enjoy fixing electronics as a hobby.

[kombatwombat]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello Everyone, My Name is Dylan.

I'm a System Administrator by Education and Training.

Lately Electronic repair at a board level has interested me so here I am.

[desone01]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi All Members,

I am new to this forum having only located it about two days ago. My name is Des and I am from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I am a retired Public Servant and will be 73 years old in November.

My first introduction to Computers was in late 1970. For a short time I was a Computer Operator. The machine was an ICL 1904A mainframe Computer. It consisted of two 16K (yes that's 16K) Computers strapped together giving a total of 32K memory. The Memory in that era consisted of tiny iron washers with wire threaded through them. There wasn't even a screen but all communication was via a teleprinter. In 1973 I left the Computer Department and went elsewhere in the organization.

In about 1982 I purchased my first home Computer. It was a Commodore 64 with two floppy disk drives, a tape drive, a dot matrix printer and a 14 inch colour monitor. I also had a Z80 CPU attachment which I could plug into the back of the C64. The main disadvantage of the C64 was that it was only 40 columns. My late brother in law had an Apple iiE and I was always envious of him.

My first real PC was another Commodore. It was a 286 CPU with an internal 10mg hard drive. It turned out to be too proprietary and some years later in about 1994 I purchased by first 486 PC machine with a SVGA monitor.

I gradually upgraded my computers and about fourteen years ago decided to go for water cooling. I did this as a bit of a challenge to myself. I have extensively used eBay over the past twenty years to purchase and sell computer equipment. I was a regular visitor to local computer markets (since closed down about six or seven years ago). I found this market to be very useful in finding good quality new and used computer components. When I decided to go for water cooling I went one better and went for chilled water cooling. I found some pure copper heatsinks at the market and purchased several. I found one of the copper blocks fitted perfectly into (upside down) into a small jiffy box and after removing some of the fins on each side araldited the heatsink into the plastic box. I drilled a hole on each side of the small box and glued two right angle half inch water connectors in each side. This became my water block. On the flat copper surface on the top of my water block I placed two 40 watt peltiers and applied heat conducting compound. On top of the peltiers (on the hot side) I attached two more of the copper heatsinks with nylon screws and nuts. On top of a much larger jiffy box I screwed two 90mm high speed fans.

The whole thing is very compact. As the high speed fans (3,800rpm) were very noisy I had to put a three step speed controller switch in the front of the box. As you can see I also put slots in the sides of the large box to allow for air flow. With the fans running at full speed the chiller lowered the water temperature by about 5 degrees centigrade. I used a separate power supply to run the chiller. In retrospect I should have redesigned the power input as the yellow 12v input wires would get quite warm due to the large current draw. This is something I never perfected. I made most of the other water cooling parts (except cpu water block, copper radiator and pump) out of garden supply parts from a large hardware store. I have not used this system for about ten years. I never had any problems with water leaks with all hose connections secured with dual cable ties.

In about 2003 I migrated to Dell laptops. I initially purchased broken Dell laptops from auctions and repaired them. I used to keep and upgrade them, upgrade to a later model and sell the old ones off. I usually stuck to Dells as I found them easy to work on and there is an ample supply of spare parts from eBay. I have never purchased directly from Dell as they are too expensive. I often make a small profit on the sale of my laptops after getting some usage out of them.

The ones I keep for myself I usually max them out (within reason) to get the maximum performance out of them. I still have two Dell XPS M1730 laptops one of which is for my wife's use and the other for myself. They were released in about 2007 and mine both still run fine. They both have extreme CPU's and the top SLI video cards for this particular model. The CCFL screen has now become a bit dated. They will take 8gb RAM even though Dell claim the maximum is only 4GB.

My current Dells are: (1) XPS 13 9350 touch screen with 16GB RAM and 1TB NVME hard drive (2) XPS 15 9550 touch screen 16GB RAM and 1TB NVME hard drive. I opted for the larger capacity battery for this one, hence only the one hard drive. I did purchase the second hard drive caddy however if I decide to go with the second drive.

I have the Dell support web site to be excellent in most cases. I have also usually stuck to the XPS range. I do have another large Dell a Precision M6600. I got this machine with 6 others at a local tip about four years ago. It's a quad core i7 and was only about four years old when I found it. It only had a small hard drive (160GB) and no power supply. It did cost quite a bit once I got it going. It now had 5TB of hard drives (2x2GB standard drives and 1TB MSATA). I put 32GB of RAM in it. It serves as my backup computer.

My other passion is photography. I have owned a SLR camera since 1978. It was a Canon AE-1. About 9-10 years ago I graduated to Digital SLRs after using smaller digitals for a number of years. My first Digital SLR was a Canon 50D which I bought new on eBay. I then purchased a number of prime and zoom lenses second hand mostly on eBay but some on Facebook Marketplace. About three years ago I went full frame with a second hand Canon 5D mk ii second hand. I soon realized that the standard Canon lenses did not do this camera justice and decided to upgrade to mostly L lenses. I purchases most of these lenses on eBay and now have a very good collection of lenses. About two years ago I went for a further upgrade and purchased a brand new Canon 5D mk iv on eBay. I also purchased a Canon 70D (body only) on FB Marketplace (bargain at $300AU) about 18 months ago.

Now back to as why I have become a member of this forum? I have now three Dell XPS 13 9350 laptops which are currently not working. All have corrupted bios'. Two appear to be completely dead however they did work for me at one stage. The third one lights up and won't boot although it did boot to Win 10 two days ago. In hope this forum can be of some assistance.

That's about it for now.

Desone

[vidax]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi everyone,
I am new on this forum.
I repair iphone and PC for 4 years
I found your forum looking for schematics and that seems to be a very usefull forum

[proeto]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

.... Greetings everybody ..... I've just joined
I was looking for some Mac info (Macbook Pro power control) and came across this site, which looks full of techies 'n tech experience 'n masses of useful information so.....

I'm Peter - started electronics at college in 1966 to become a Marine Radio Officer, joined my first ship in 1968 with solid morse code and a high level of technical confidence - until something broke down.
I persevered, and finally learned to actually fix things instead of just pass exams.
It all became a bit of a hobby - I used to carry a full toolkit and build stuff.... digital kit was really expensive so I built test equipment.... my first frequency counter !
Got a super full qwerty hand-held 'computer' so taught myself Basic from a book - chapter four was difficult as it was about the monitor.... which I didn't have !
1976 I went back to college (Bristol, UK) to do 'Advanced Marine Electronics' - lots of maths , speed-logs, antenna/transmissionline theory, cctv.... all sorts of stuff
1983 I got married in Russia - 1984 went to college in Cardiff, UK, for a course on new radar systems - 1989 tried to leave the ships ... got a job at Panasonic as a "troubleshooter" - three of us working through a stack of faulty printer pcbs - then worked with a squad from Japan building the prototype and robotic production line of Panasonic's first colour printer ..... 1990 was contacted by a mobile radio company, the main service centre in South Wales for Motorola and offered a job - learned loads about vhf and uhf and radio networks (worked on building the radio net at the Channel Tunnel site - the biggest building site in Europe !)
- about a year later I went back to sea (more money and 18 days per month paid holiday) - worked for an oil major - did courses on GPS and satellite systems, and had to retrain as an Engineer (the morse key was finally abandoned) so I would also be responsible for all the engine control systems, fire-detection systems etc - then had rapid training in Microsoft networking so that four of us could zoom around networking 32 ships and doing one-on-one training of Microsoft stuff (working independently, not as a group) - then fly around again doing upgrades and repairs etc - then I was seconded to the Australian division to build the networks on their ships.
About 3 and a half years (and about 50 networks) later I went to another oil major and ended up on LNG ships going from the UAE to Japan back and forth - four months on and 80 days off - then the Emirati owners took over management and I was one of the 'stayers' .... pay increase plus ten weeks on and ten weeks off !
Was pulled into the Abu Dhabi office to help with a big IT project of 'SAP' .... which was then put 'on hold'....
I finished at 65 and retired .... to get a phone call three weeks later and did I fancy continuing with the SAP project....
Two year contract based in Abu Dhabi - and suddenly my wife (a retired music teacher) saw an Abu Dhabi school advertising ....
Two years later I retired again - but Natasha was now Head of Music, so I became a 'House Husband'
Started repairing windows machines and home networks - then did a Mac repair !
.... bought the oldest, cheapest Mac I could fine and started Macs - three years and about 160 Macs later I'm really set to have a go at smd repairs ..... and came to this site for info ..... and that's the story, folks
On a personal note, I speak French (got a house in France), German, and Greek (worked on their ships - and could even take morse code in German and Greek straight on to a German or Greek typewriter).... and I was 71 this year !

[pavinski]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hey All! I'm a developer in Sheffield, UK, looking to get into the electronic engineering side of the pond From the UK, glad to be a part of the community. There's a wealth of expertise of knowledge here and I hope one day I can be in the position to contribute. Thanks for being awesome.

[desone01]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello everyone, greetings from Colombia. The land of coffee and other "stimulating substances" . I'm an electronics service techinician for about 15 years. Mostly working on computers, consumer electronics and printers. Weekend motorcycle mechanic as well, IBM/lenovo thinkpad fetishist, hahah, i love those systems!! I'm about to finish my degree on Mechatronics Engineering. My english is good but somtimes i made mistakes, sorry for that. I hope to learn a lot from the badcaps.net community, thank you!!!

I love that one. It's good to see you have a good sense of humour.

[musanide]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Thanx for accepting me here.. I have been on this forum for sam days or months its been a good journey so far and i want continue and paticipate also... Amd a learning it engineer in zambia thanx

[frank bowman]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

hi folks. i am new to this forum.i like to find out why things have stopped working and have a go at fixing them. i have done some camera lenses-some tv's - some monitors. some computers. as i am self taught i am willing to learn. spent 40 years mobile tuning. so no longer get headaches .any way nice to read about the problems that people have on this forum and the help that is given

[fcg]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

hi guys an hp 840 g3 with bad bios brought me here made a corrupt dump now i cannot start the computer., it had bios password. i am trying to repair some old eletronics, hope i am to the right place.

i hope i can learn from you guys and i will start folowing the threads, who know i am also able to help someone.

thanks

[DarrenB123]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hey everyone, I'm interested in everything tech, I can answer questions and hopefully you can answer some of mine as well. hope y'all have an amazing day 😁

[Materialsguy]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Glad to jump aboard! Professionally I work in Materials Engineering but vintage electronics is my enthusiast level hobby: Tek, HP, Keithley gear from 1960's - 1990's are in my lab.

Thanks

[kurland]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi all,

Happy to be here. Great to have an electronics repair community like this...
Cheers