My laptop has a broken hinge, I was carrying it across the room and tripped on a toy and laptop went flying, it worked fine for a couple weeks no problems at all, but now the left hinge in bulging and it does not open or close properly. Is this something you would be able to repair, and if so how much do you think it would cost? I need my laptop to run my business.

The response follows;

Hi–

It will be difficult to pin down precisely your repair cost without more information. I can look up your hinge (L/R) to get a price if you can let me know the exact model. For instance a Toshiba Satellite A105 has many sub-models; some with intel processors, some AMD. The same is true of other makes as well. If your laptop doesn’t specify a sub-model on the palmrest, look for a label on the bottom.

The bulge you mentioned is likely from the broken hinge staying in one position while the other opens & closes. With luck, you will only be replacing the hinge, which can normally be done within an hour. I call on luck here because of the possibility of some other part being what broke. The hinge is usually attached to the lcd screen, the plastic frame & lid the screen is mounted in, and the base portion of the laptop. Frequently, the easy fix is to find a complete lid assembly with a bad screen (from ebay), put your good one in it, the install the entire lid. Transferring your screen to another lid assembly and installing it entirely shouldn’t take over 1.5 hours.

It is frequently possible to repair some of these other parts without replacing them. Unfortunately, an accurate assessment sometimes requires exploratory surgery. I should mention that worst case scenario would be if the frame of the base portion of the computer had broken and couldn’t be mended. In those circumstances your mainboard, dvd, hard drive, etc., would all have to be transferred to another case. Here again, however, parts donors can be found in the listings of dead/for parts only systems of the same model on ebay.

Please note that if your laptop comes to Affordable Laptop Service, the objective will be to keep it in your hands rather than on my shelf. We can order a part and wait until it’s convenient to install if we can determine what you need with a free examination of your laptop.

Please call to arrange examination of the patient.

A: Note that few laptops have a separate video card; usually the graphics controller is surface mounted on the mainboard. However, there are several alternatives for you.

First, we can see about installing the correct drivers needed for your video, which is usually all that is required to make your video work as it should. This is a software fix that shouldn’t require more than an hour.

Secondly, if this laptop isn’t fairly new, it may require fresh heatsink compound for the graphics chip to perform up to it’s potential. For most laptops, this would require disassembly, then re-assembly of the laptop. Each step (disassembly, then re-assembly) takes an hour and would include cleaning the dustbunnies out of the cooling fans and fresh heatsink compound for the processor as well.

Finally, as a last resort, I can have the graphics controller re-flowed so that the contacts of the surface mounted part make better contact with the mainboard. This process includes the two hour effort of step 2 and another hour to re-flow the graphics controller; 3 hours total.

When you wish an appointment to resolve you video problem, please call 321-720-7705 (9am – 9pm, daily).

To be straight with you, you may be eventually facing replacement of the screen. However, it may be possible to patch up your laptop to give many more hours of service before you have to do that.

What happens is that when the lid is repeatedly flexed (for instance by tilting it from a corner instead of the middle at the top or both sides at once) some of the extremely fine individual connections for the display can become intermittent or even fail. Failed connections like this will result in a stripe 1 pixel wide or more with no display at all.

I have a commercial client in Merritt Island who has a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a similar problem. In his case the hinges and other hardware in the lid had loosened up a bit and he was losing about the bottom 20% of his display. In his case, it took about an hour to tighten up the display hardware and cable connections. When he boots up that 20% still blanks out, but when he pinches the frame of the display it fills in. I check ebay occaisionally and let him know if I spot a deal on a replacement for his screen. As bad as this laptop was he has continued using it for around 4 months now waiting for a deal on a replacement screen.

In your case, I don’t know the model number of your HP laptop to tell you the cost of a replacement screen, but installation takes around an hour to an hour and a half…same as the time it would take to bolster what you have to get you by for now. My rate is $30/hr which you won’t find at computer or office supply stores that mostly won’t attempt physical repairs on laptops anyway.

When you’re ready to get a new screen, we’ll need to find a replacement and get it ordered. There are far too many to stock except for screen specialists. However prices are reasonable for new screens with prompt delivery from reputable sources. It seldom takes more than 1.5 hours to install.
Please call 321-720-7705 (9am – 9pm) to arrange a time.

At it’s best, Fedora wouldn’t both let you choose which packages to load and be portable from one system to another on a removable hard drive like RedHat. The latest version of Fedora makes Ubuntu look smart, but not as smart as Mandriva. (I’ve always preferred KDE to the Gnome environment.)

I’ve heard of (but not searched out) mirrors where it may be possible to download RedHat 10 (or later) images as freebies.

I’m not sure about the rates for 802.11n and MIMO, but how fast can you type? This sounds like a silly question, but your current 11mbps rate will take the fastest internet currently available (10mbps). The only difference the faster connections would make is in transferring files between systems on a network. Note, however, that the fastest router can only move data as fast as your computer can handle it, which is to say that if the wireless card in your computer is 802.11b (11mbps) that will also limit your speed. However, the newer technologies supposedly are backwards compatible, so you could get a faster router and add a card later, but in some cases, you can get a wireless card with a router.