Got a first degree microburn & pronounced dead

loveydovey

loveydovey

I have this nice Intel 4-core Lenovo laptop gathering dust. The little prick gave me a full first degree microburn on a finger that blistered up!

I had the laptop back cover open because it suddenly stopped powering on. I touched one of the chips which was as hot as the surface of the Sun. It's some small chip. It must be the reason that laptop is now defunct. So sad! How in the world does that happen? It's also weird because there's no charring, no smoke, no heat defects visually on the chip.

Is there any remedy for the poor thing? I can't diagnose anything, the screen stays blank, and one of the chips goes lava hot when I power it on. I so want to put FreeBSD on it.

Any interesting resuscitation/resurrection stories?
 
Now now, no swearing... 😂

Can we have a photo of the offending circuit board and point out which chip got hot? At a first guess it's probably a blown voltage regulator, but of course it could be any number of things. Any repair shop with surface mount rework capabilities should be able to replace the chip, if they can get hold of the part. Or it could be a short or damaged components or tracks near the chip. A photo would be useful to get some idea of what happened. Take a photo and draw a circle around the chip that got hot and post it on here?

A useful trick is to get one of the magnifier apps for your phone, get a good magnified shot of the chip that did the damage, and take a screenshot, it should then be easy to read the chip ident numbers off the back, and / or spot any damage to the surrounding board area.

It might also help to know what model of lenovo laptop it is!

Or if you want someone well-known and good to look at it, take it to Louis Rossmann, I think he's in New York. He's probably not cheap though. Nothing good is.

P.S. - That's the first time in my life I've heard of a '1st degree microburn' 😁
 
For example, here are two photos, one magnified onto one specific chip. Both were taken with this free app. Can you do the same with your machine and post the photos here, identifying which is the offending hot chip? Can you see any obvious damage in the area around the hot chip? Let's have a look at it.
play.google.com

Magnifying Glass – Apps on Google Play

Magnifying Glass can help you magnify small things and texts.
play.google.com play.google.com

dv1.jpg
dv2.jpg
 
I have a nice super thick physical lens. I'll take a picture. I forget which chip it was, I guess I'll have to find it by touch? ❤️‍🔥
 
Somewhere I saw that they now have "affordable" (many dozen or a few hundred of $) thermal cameras you can attach to your cell phone. They used to run several thousand, so coming down to $100 (+- factor of 2) is a great improvement.

Another trick: Turn the board so the chips are up. Lightly spray it with good-quality (99%) isopropyl alcohol, until everything is slightly moist. Turn the board on, and the first chip to get dry is the hot one. Do not use cheap drug store grade (70%) isopropyl, because when drying it leaves liquid water around, which is electrically conducting. I'm sure there are other non-conductive liquids you could use, but isopropyl is easy to find.
 
Ugh, it'll take me a while to get to this. The laptop disassembly is hell. This happened a while ago, and I forgot how nasty that disassembly is.

On the bright side, I reanimated one of my wireless mice. The scrolling wheel would act crazy. It'd scroll up and down regardless of where you were scrolling. It is actually common - the rotary encoder gets dust, dirt, slime in between contacts. Nothing a good drop of alcohol and a few blows can't clean out. I'm sure ya'll do this too?
 
It's probably a good idea to avoid drinking the IPA, not recommended! 😂 I had a quick check on amazon and found plenty of high purity options, eg this one is 99.9% concentration.

Cheap handheld thermal cameras are available from the usual place, I've used thermal cameras of this type in the test lab at work, they work well enough. A quick search found this one, there are lots of different types.
 
Alain De Vos said:
I remember when i was in New-Jersey , be carefull for micro-crackings
Click to expand...
Watch out for cracked tracks on the board, that's another common source of problems, if perhaps you have dropped the laptop or flexed the board at some point. You might be able to spot a cracked track visually, or by doing continuity or resistance tests with a multimeter. Another similar fault to look for is a cracked solder joint, although those can be pretty hard to spot with tiny surface mount components. Or can you spot any electrolytic caps with bulging tops? Did anything get spilt on the board in the distant past resulting in some visible residue?

What model of laptop is it?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top