Every now and then I pop onto eBay or into a thrift store and see what kind of things I can find – electronic usually. I am a believer in the fact that old electronics (computers especially) often times times still have life left in them when someone throws them out. So I thought that it might be fun to explore what kinds of old electronics I run across, what repairs I might need to do to them, and what kind of life can I squeeze out of these things I find.
Kicking off this dive we have two tales of when sometimes eBay is a good and bad … First, a good listing, this Asus gaming laptop – up for sale because it “did not boot”.The picture that the seller was showing was that of a blue BIOS screen saying the laptop would just boot loop back to that screen. Knowing that a laptop setup to boot UEFI that did not have an OS installed would do just that, so I scooped it up. My hunch was 100% correct, the OS was missing or damaged. A quick reinstall of Windows and I had a working gaming laptop.
Working Windows AND it has 2 hard drives!
Now, sometimes eBay is not so good… Thinking I would get lucky twice, the listing said that the keyboard had water on it for an hour – just some water on the keyboard should be no big deal to repair. I went ahead and took the plunge…
The Lenovo laptop arrived looking fantastic and did not burst into flames when I plugged in the charger but it would not power up. So I opened the shell…
Well that corrosion in the middle of the main board tells the whole story. The “hour of water” had caused corrosion that ate through the main board damaged the battery connectors, various flexible connectors, and basically destroyed the board. The M.2 and hard drive had been removed so the seller would have likely known the board had sustained this much damage – and was not mentioned.
The point of these eBay stories is that not all listings are good and not all are bad. Obviously “Buyer Beware”, be sure to read the fine print and when the offer looks too good to believe, it probably is and you should not waste your money.