Thank you to everyone here!

[chrisatpsu]

Thanks to this site, I'm been able to fix my wife's laptop, and my neice's laptop.
before i joined, i simply did not have the soldering skills to do it.

they have Toshiba laptops where the plastic power jack inside broke.
I was able to remove the plastic jacks, drill out the hole in the side, and replace with a metal jack. (it's a lot stronger than the plastic ones)

[tbone321]

Your welcome now stop playing with those toys and get yourself a REAL soldering station, perhaps a rework station.  Then you would have a much easier time with those surface mount chips.

[peteandvanessa]

My Son (who's 17), has figured out why some of the HP Laptops fail. On some of the earlier HP Laptops, the cooling for the internal graphics chips is inadequate, which causes one or two on the pins on the graphics chips to lift off the motherboard.
When you try to boot the Laptop, the Graphics chip doesn't output to the screen and hence the Laptop is thought to be trash, so they give him the Laptops for free.

What he does, is to dismantle the Laptop to get to the graphics chip. He then re-flows the Graphics chip by heating it up with a re-flow station (cost me about $90, that I use to build the DLA projects) with the heatgun attachment (set at about 450 degrees C). Once the solder on the motherboard melts (re-flows), he pushed down hard on the chip and lets it cool.

Here's the re-work station I use:
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He then gets an early penny (it has to be an early penny, since they had more copper in them apparently and stops the cooling problem), coats each side of the penny with some heatsink compound and applys this BETWEEN the Graphics chip and the Graphics chip heatsink. He then reassembles the Laptop and all is well again.

He's successfully repaired 4 HP Laptops that are still working after 1 year since the repair.

[tbone321]

I don't believe that the new pennies have any copper in them at all since now the copper is worth more than the coin.

[chrisatpsu]

1982–present
97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper (core: 99.2% zinc, 0.8% copper; plating: pure copper)

from wikipedia

[tbone321]

LOL, ok.... so there is enough copper for color only. 

[peteandvanessa]

1982–present
97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper (core: 99.2% zinc, 0.8% copper; plating: pure copper)

from wikipedia

That's the magic year, according to a few articles on the web, pennies from 1982 and earlier had 95% copper, after 1982 they had 2.5% copper or less.

Hence the earlier pennies are great for the HP Heatsink trick