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Comment by sharpercoder | Hacker News Reader

Had t40p for 10+ years. Dropped it from ~2m high several times. Got coffee over it numerous times. Kids of my sister left it drowning in a puddle of ice-cream ice.

I cleaned it with water a bunch of times, worked after drying. I even reflowed the motherboard after the housing got a little bit less stiff and random resets and freezes occured.

I think my sister still has it. I should get it back and hang it on the wall or something.

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> I even reflowed the motherboard after the housing got a [...]

How does one do that? Did you do it in a professional shop, or at home? What is the tooling required? I am interested in all details.

I did it around 2008, I put it into a kitchen over with a laser temperature meter present to check temps. Basically, you remove the motherboard, strip as much as possible, put it into a controlled high temperature space (an oven), melt the solder and then let it cool down.

Yeah my T41p had the same problem with the GPU (specifically ATI I seem to remember) popping out of its BGA socket slightly, sometimes (and in my case) caused by picking up the laptop by the corner of the palmrest (naughty but common habit that you usually get away with on Thinkpads)... was a common problem in those series with the oven reflow technique http://www.computerrepairtips.net/how-to-reflow-a-laptop-mot... working for lots of people. Didn't work for me but I think that was my failing. I fixed it with a folded up credit card inside under the trackpoint/palmrest, acted as a crude wide spring applying pressure over the heatsink/pipe of the gpu, horrific bodge lol but it worked and I carried on using the machine for years without problems after that.

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