Building a laptop questions..

D

devarinti

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
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First off, I know building a laptop is generally foolish in terms of how much it costs considering it is probably cheaper to just buy one. But this is a unique situation. So, I was given a laptop with beer spilled on it. This beer apparently had spilled a while ago and I was given it like three weeks later to fix it. I opened the thing up all the way and there really didn't seem to be any residue on the inside anywhere. To my eye, there was no damage done on the inside. Apparently the beer spilled on the laptop, literally, while the laptop was closed so it's not like it spilled on the keyboard or anything. Anyway, point is, I tell the guy it'll cost me more to fix it than him buying a new laptop considering this thing is already a few years old. I told him that because I figured it was replacing a motherboard and all that. Guy tells me, alright well you can junk it. So now I've a laptop sitting there that doesn't work.

Its a Toshiba Satellite A105-S2141. When I hit the power button all the lights flash once and nothing. But it does seem to charge because the charging light goes on when it's plugged in. As I said I opened it up and there's no real residue anywhere on the inside and beer would leave a residue I'd think. So I was thinking either sell it off as parts, but then I don't know what parts work and what don't. So, I was thinking why not just rebuild it. Is this thing fixable btw or should I just rebuild it and sell it. Like just use the shell, a whole new motherboard, processor etc etc etc. Custom build with an existing toshiba shell and then sell it. Plus I already have a monitor on the thing and RAM and the wifi card and the DVD Drive, assuming they all work. The RAM works, can't say much for the rest of them. So any suggestions on a build?

OR

Is it fixable based on the it flashes once when the power button is pressed and nothing else happens diagnosis?

OR

Should I just hit the recycle bin?

BTW if I do rebuild it I want to sell it for a profit, at least like a hundred bucks, if not that's kind of pointless and a waste of my money considering I've no use for any more computers in my house.
 
u sound just like me man. I just sold a dell inspiron 9100 I paid 1500bux for, it lasted a year and blew up. sold it at a garage sale for 5 bux, after having all these ideas with it, buy new motherboard off Ebay for 100bux. when the same model laptop in working order sells for 200bux on ebay. then if I fixed the laptop... I already had a laptop, what am I guna do with a 2nd laptop..

answer is, if u already have a working laptop of your own.. dont put to much effort into fixing this one, u got it for free. so ur not loosing anything..

if u dont have a job and need money, then try to make money off it, otherwise its just not worth it
 
well I just so happen to be in the don't have a job at the moment and need some money crowd. plus i've built PCs in the past so I am thinking it shouldn't be too hard to build a laptop, that is if its profitable to beign with. could use the cash to pay off little bills, thats why.
 
I think the only way you can make $100 with that laptop is to fashion it into the shape of a gun and use it to rob a 7-11 :D
 
Roman79 said:
I think the only way you can make $100 with that laptop is to fashion it into the shape of a gun and use it to rob a 7-11 :D
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So i take that as a hit the recycle bin.. I have enough legal issues at the moment, I don't think I need to try the 7/11 thing. B'sides I'm Indian and sticking up a 7/11 is like brown on brown violence.
 
devarinti said:
So i take that as a hit the recycle bin.. I have enough legal issues at the moment, I don't think I need to try the 7/11 thing. B'sides I'm Indian and sticking up a 7/11 is like brown on brown violence.
Click to expand...

rofl made me lol at work
 
LOL too funny!

But seriously I vote for the recycling bin. If Google hasn't steered me wrong that's a fairly old laptop (Celeron right?). Even if it was already working I doubt it's worth more than a couple hundred bucks.

Perhaps strip it down and sell the parts on Ebay as is?
 
Agreed. Scrap for parts and ebay it. Price the stuff to move. Or just throw the whole thing on Ebay and mark it as parts not working. if you get $20, that is $20 more than you had before.
 
Roman79 said:
LOL too funny!

But seriously I vote for the recycling bin. If Google hasn't steered me wrong that's a fairly old laptop (Celeron right?). Even if it was already working I doubt it's worth more than a couple hundred bucks.

Perhaps strip it down and sell the parts on Ebay as is?
Click to expand...

I am not too sure if it's a celeron but yeah I looked it up a few days ago as well and its a good few years old. It might be an early dual core but if I had to guess probably a celeron. As far as the parts I took the 1 gig ram stick and dumped it into my crappy ass laptop, figured it could use the extra gig. I guess I'll try to sell the hard drive and probably could sell the keyboard and LCD screen as well, maybe even the hard drive. I'd just hate to sell this stuff and then the buyer finds out the parts are not working. Thing is I don't know if any of the parts are working or not and I have no set way of checking. All I know is the RAM works cuz I plugged it into my laptop and works fine. Tried the hard drive but my laptop has a freaking ATA harddrive(not sure) and this thing is a HDD. Doesn't fit.

Twenty bucks is indeed twenty bucks I didn't have before.
 
It is a Celeron M, which is a decent processor for the day, but it gets slapped around by dual core offerings of today. Flash these days, isn't too kind to CPUs of that era. The Pentium Ms of a faster speed go for around $5-$10. You will probably find it hard just to give the processor away since Celeron M's are usually what people are upgrading from and not to.

To note, if selling on Ebay, just listed it as "For parts not working" and in the description state that you have no way to test, etc.

To note, if both comps can use the same ram, then good chance they can use the same hard drives. Your laptop might have an adapter of sorts it is attached to, or the Toshiba one might have one that you need to remove first.

Here is the spec sheet:
http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/product/pdf_files/detailed_specs/satellite_A105-S2141.pdf

Seems this uses a SATA hard drive and DDR2 Ram. So this must have been one of the later models. I wouldn't be surprised if the optical drive was IDE.

I would expect that the motherboard is the only thing shot. They really don't take too kindly to having liquid of any kind poured on them when in operation. If you got the power cord and battery, don't forget those! Should be able to get a fair amount for an original Toshiba power adapter. Battery hard to say depending upon abuse. No real way to test that one out without another laptop.
 
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