This laptop was given to me by a customer. It didn't turn on or charge. No sign of life. But, it was complete. No missing parts. No physical damage. It had the original charger. So, I opened it up. I see that it had been opened up before. So, there was an attempt to fix it. I tested the hard drive. It worked perfectly fine. Again, there was nothing missing.
My diagnosis is that the motherboard went bad. This is an older laptop, so finding new parts were near impossible. So, I went to eBay to see what I could find. Found a used motherboard from a reputable seller.
The part came in and I started the rebuild.
Used the RAM from the original motherboard. Applied new thermal paste to the CPU. Installed a new CMOS battery. I put everything back together and the computer turned on. Booted into Windows. I ran hardware diagnostics and everything passed. Now, the only thing left was to replace the bad battery now that I knew everything worked fine. I buy only original parts, batteries and chargers. I stay from third party parts. Well, the battery came in and I installed it. The laptop keeps a charge and works like nothing ever happened.
The laptop has been sold since. This was a fun project. On to the next build and rebuild.
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