My old laptop has developed a nasty problem. Any time you lift or move it by a corner the screen goes completly blank and does not show up even on the VGA port until the laptop is rebooted. Since it was clearly a hardware problem I took the laptop completely apart, cleaned everything, checking for obvious signs of problems, which were none, and put it back together (sans couple obligatory screws that tend to magically appear after everything is assembled). The result – the problem became worse. This is where the old friend google came in (STFW) and said to look at chips that tend to get desodered with time. Sure enough, if I put pressure on the south bridge right next to the GPU the problem disappeared. Now, reflowing bad ball grid arrays is not my speciality, so I opted for a rather simpler solution. I cut a flat piece of an old eraser and stuck it between the keyboard and the south bridge. Screw the keyboad back in and….it worked like a charm! It’ll be interesting to see how long the oldie survives with this “hack”.

PS. I could also tell you how I unlocked an Athlon CPU with a knife, or fixed a motherboard with a soldering iron…but that is a different story.