One fateful afternoon about a year back, a friend spilled coffee over their otherwise perfectly fine laptop. The machine continued running, slowly chewing through its battery, but it would no longer let itself get convinced to charge.
Wildly overestimating my abilities I took the machine off their hands. How difficult could debugging a laptop motherboard be? It turns out, difficult. I disconnected the somewhat spicy pillow of a battery, cleaned the board with isopropanol, and checked for any obvious faults. After two attempts, and new found appreciation for YouTube channels auch as Electronics Repair School, it was time for Plan B: Finding a cheap second laptop of the same kind. Ideally with opposite damages as all I needed was a functioning motherboard. Fast forward a non-negligible amount of Kleinanzeigen notifications, I found it: Fully specced, good condition, functional display but without backlight. For 100€, here was a chance to revive my friend's laptop.
Inspecting the new (second hand) machine, it was clear somebody had already opened it. Some screws were missing and it was also clear why the backlight wasn't working: It wasn't connected. In fact, the cable was wrapped in insulation tape, likely to shield it from the somewhat bent pins of the connector on the board.
Luckily, the bent wasn't too bad. A few careful nudges with a flat screw driver was all it took for the motherboard to connect to the display in my friend's machine.
One thing that did not go well: When disconnecting the WiFi antenna from the Kleinanzeigen machine, the tiny WiFi card connectors just sort of broke off. They were fairly brittle. Interestingly, the two machines featured different WiFi cards, and while I'm guessing they would be interchangeable, it's not certain. Not to speak of the fact that surface mount soldering is not currently featured in my repertoire of skills...
Pictured below in compartment A-9, the piece that chipped off.
Nonetheless, for 100€, here's a functional, WiFi-dongle-enhanced Dell that's got enough power for day-to-day tasks and some light development work.
