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Broken video card, toasted mother board?

is your computer screen jacked? no worries or fear Points quick Easy bake lesson is here...

the mac genius may have said buy an new logic board though before throwing down the cash... try cooking the sucker..


This has worked to varying degrees of success... though it has gained several more months of computer life out of my mac book pro.



screen scrambled start up 1 time in ten...


follow an online instructions on how to take your computer apart


clean off all the old thermal paste and prepare to cook it by making a thermal shild


with heat shield in place logic board flipped over use heat gun for about 10 minutes... place test solder near opening to video card once it melts continue on for a couple more minutes



apply thermal paste and put it all back together carefully ..


and walla it might actually start up and work normally



for more detailed instructions google reflowing your motherboard or logic board this was just something to let you know it can be done...

so if it only failed 1 time in 10, what's the failure rate now?

(having taken apart a couple if ibooks/macbooks, i think i would have just not shut down my mac if i had that problem. )

vinylrake wrote:so if it only failed 1 time in 10, what's the failure rate now?

(having taken apart a couple if ibooks/macbooks, i think i would have just not shut down my mac if i had that problem. )

it gets progressivly worse then stops booting all together... usually 1 out of ten tries a safe boot works after the screen gets like that first image allowing to back ups some data though not good for much else.

after the bake its basically all good under the hood till it overheats again ... 85 degrees centigrade seems to be the death nail for my mac book pro.... any sustained time at that heat range and within a week my screen starts to scramble and degrade...

reflowing the solder seems to last about 3 months... it might last longer if i ran the heat gun on it longer, though im trying hard not too cook any of the other components..

this will be my 4th time at it... fist time i wrapped in a blanked and let it overheat which restored function for a couple weeks... these other times I have used a heat gun... (the image above had me try it with a hair dryer FAIL- i got a heat gun the next day and it worked) ... anycase as long as i use fan control and have a clear path for the vent i can keep it under 80 degrees not sure on other macbooks but anything over 75 i think starts to degrade the connections.

i assume you've looked into those under laptop cooling fans or other general fans, or other methods of cooling?

i am glad you found a way to make your computer function, just sounds awfully extreme if the cause is 'just' overheating.

hey maybe you could just move your computer next to your refrigerator and get a longer cable for the motherboard so you could dangle the motherboard in the fridge and have the rest of the comp outside the fridge...

Or just get........you know.........a different one

not everyone has an extra grand just lying around.

There's some nice HP laptops for about $500 bucks.

yes, but i was assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that anyone willing to going to that much trouble (repeatedly) to make his mac work probably wasn't going to be at the head of the line to buy a windows laptop.

vinylrake wrote:yes, but i was assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that anyone willing to going to that much trouble (repeatedly) to make his mac work probably wasn't going to be at the head of the line to buy a windows laptop.

Back when i could right off a new laptop every year for work that was one thing... now that it comes out of my personal budget I want to make smart purchases and even more important wait till the computer has greatly improved from the last version..

I like the macs better for sure... i will stay away from pc's window ME anyone or how about vista... ya not so eager to try a new windows os. maybe in the future windows 7,8,9, X will change my mind.

my video card once again reflowed and works... so basically yes i could of replaced it... though borrowing a neighbors heat gun, taking some screws out, buying some thermal paste and wrapping the logic board in tin foil and cooking it was much more fun... and most importantly allows me to wait for just the right computer to find its way into the stores.

total time to do this...
borrow heat gun 15mins of small talk at neighbors
taking apart the mac 15 mins
prep logic board 5min
cooking with heat gun 7mins
cooling on a shelf 4hrs
reassembly 15mins
prayers that it would work before plugging in 15 seconds

boom back in business...

Thanks for the solution Point ..however, i`m just curious what are you heating?is it the mother board? what if it really is toasted could heating it not produce further damage?

Thanks

if the motherboard is really 'toasted' there's not much you can do to make it worse, at least i haven't run into any repair places that will repair anything on the motherboard they just swap the whole thing out and put in a new one.

Nice. I might attempt this on my old laptop. At least not much harm done if I screw up. Where do you get thermal paste, btw? Do they have it on a regular hardware?

JeanR wrote:Nice. I might attempt this on my old laptop. At least not much harm done if I screw up. Where do you get thermal paste, btw? Do they have it on a regular hardware?

sorry missed replying to this sooner...

Thermal paste attaches the various chips to the heatsink you can get it at radioshack or online... its kind of a pain to put on and get think and smooth though if you do it right your computer will run cooler if you do it wrong the graphics card chip, processor etc... will operate at a lot warmer temperature. best thing to do is know what temperature your computer is operating at beforehand then test it again after... I use a program called SMCFanControl works great and has helped me monitor the temperature and so far I have avoided having to reflow the board again

I did this fix on two macs... and all these later they both still start right up and allow me to travel back in time to some old mac operating systems and programs.

What if the computer just gives you critic firmware messages on start up or eventual crashes and freezes? Cause that's whats happening to my G5 now.