Tech Reaction

Many of us computer geeks have friends and family who turn to us time and time again with problems with there computers, we either fix the problem or scrap the machine.

We also run into older pieces of equipment that for what ever reason we decided it might have some use and take it back home to see what we can do with it.

A few months back a friend of mine was having issues with his wife’s old laptop, it would shut down on its own from time to time. The laptop in question is a eMachine M5305.

This is about a seven year old laptop now and had a sale price of ~$1,200 back then. Equipped with a blazing fast AMD Athlon XP-M 2200+ CPU clocked at 1789.4mhz in stock config., and stacked with 512meg of RAM this unit was a nice laptop, back then

Now a days these types of laptops are much faster and capable machines, but do older ones still have a use and worth repairing ?  Lets find out …

With a up and coming testing project I found myself needing a laptop that I could use along side my benching equipment. I had this laptop just sitting off on a shelf doing nothing so I decided to take another look at it today and see whats up with it.

This machine would turn on and get to the desktop and run for a few minutes then just shut itself off. A fresh battery was installed months ago so that left pretty much one thing it could be, over heating.

Searching around the web about these machines you find that it is pretty common that they over heat and do the very same thing that happens with this machine.

I found this nice guide on how to get inside one of these machines and went at it.

http://dexplor.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=171&highlight=5305+overheat

After opening up the machine I see this. It was not as bad as I had thought, showing just how badly a little bit of dust in the cooling area can have adverse effects on these machine.

So now pulling out the fan and seeing whats inside.

So with that cleaned out she is up and running, tho it still runs hot, but it doesn’t shut down at all anymore. With the covers all screwed back in place she runs a nice toasty 82 degrees. This follows with all that I have read about these laptops, they run hot.

Desktop picture of CPUz and HWmonitor

In the end I had a machine that had lived its life doing simple things, broke down and was discarded, and replaced by a new machine. The first owner is much happier with the new laptop as this thing is rather slow.

But as I found a need for it, it was a pretty simple job to bring it back into usefulness and a test/monitoring machine for a new project that I will show later when that is all up and running.

Here she is, the revived eMachine M5305 working just fine