Laptop repair 'professionals' almost cost me my £1k laptop.

It starts with a fundamental problem most Lenovo laptops have. I didn't know this at the time, but Lenovo laptops have a hinge problem. Their hinges become too stiff and they pry apart the shoddily built chassis (or screen).

So when my laptop started coming apart at the seams I assumed I'd damaged it somehow. But, me being a broke student at the time, I couldn't afford to repair it then and so the problem went on unchecked.

Lo and behold one day I lifted it up and with a flash of blue light, and a puff of smoke it was dead. The charging wire had pulled too hard on the chassis and killed the laptop.

Now, I was just about to start my second year of University, I couldn't afford to not have my laptop. Especially as I was a film production student, I needed all the PC time I could get.

I conceded it was probably time to take it to the laptop repair shop

When I arrived they took the laptop and said they'd have a look at it and that I aught to come back in a couple of days.

So off I went, sure they'd find the solution but apprehensive of the cost.

It was a great laptop, a gaming laptop to be precise. It had the best specs I could afford for the £1,000 max I could spend, so I was prepared to fork out quite a bit for the repair.

However, when I returned only to be told 'Well, we're sorry to tell you that it's basically a write-off. But, for the measly cost of £750 we could probably fix it' I was understandably unable to pay such an extortionate amount, not with the overly expensive Cambridge rent and the ever growing list of SD cards, batteries, books and whatever else the University wanted us to buy.

I spent the rest of University watching as the overpriced replacement HP laptop struggled with three google chrome tabs; good for writing word documents and that was about it, and as a film production student that was infuriating.

Cut to four years later

I'd graduated a few years back, after many exhausting hours spent in the editing suits at University and subsequently too many cold, late-night walks home to count - entirely due to the fact that the laptop I would have used to edit on was now gathering dust in some cardboard box- but I'd graduated all the same, and now lived in a rural village in the North of England.

By now I'd moved houses maybe 6 times and the boxes that filled my room were getting out of hand. So, it was decided that we should have a clear out (I'd acquired a boyfriend by now and he wanted to free up some of the space his hoarder girlfriend was taking up with all of her junk haha).

So as we rummaged around in old boxes full of clutter and memorabilia my boyfriend picked up the old, broken laptop I'd been keeping around for sentimental value. (As you can probably guess, there were a lot of things with 'sentimental value' ) He piped up that after four years of keeping a useless laptop it was probably time to get rid.

But sentiment held me back

I'd thought the same on numerous occasions myself, but then I would recall that time he Skyped me at five in the morning when we were first courting, as he walked home tipsy from a good night out with his friends, or that time I got black-out drunk and was carried home by my Uni friends and at some point they took possession of my laptop to fill the Facebook group chat with untold obscenities under my name.

When he asked me to get rid of it this time, I thought perhaps he was right, I couldn't have it taking up valuable space for the sake of a few good memories.

Looking again at the dusty exterior of the once fabulous gaming laptop I relented, allowing him to gather up its wires and just as he was about to place it in the bin pile.

I had a thought.

'If I'm getting rid of it anyway, I might as well have a peek inside, right?.'

Excitedly, I brought up all the disassembly YouTube videos I could find and set about pulling it to pieces.

Somewhere along my journey to becoming a fully fledged technician what did I happen to stumble across? A broken wire. I shrugged it off at first, I already knew it was broken, it wasn't a shock to find something broken inside.

But then I started to think about it. If this wire (which turned out to be a DC jack cable; for anyone reading this who actually knows what that is) that was meant to supply power to the laptop was broken back then, and it was still broken now, how could they have tested the laptop to see that it was a write-off, if without this it was impossible to turn the laptop on in the first place?

This got me thinking; of course there was every possibility that they had some weird battery testing kit that I have no idea about, but after a quick search on Ebay I could test my theory for £4.

I thought what the heck, £4 wasn't extortionate and with free delivery to boot! There was very little to lose.

A couple of days later and £4 lighter

I had the wire replacement.

Then came the arduous and nerve wrecking process of replacing the wire. With tools at the ready and YouTube on stand-by I was ready to test my theory!

Now, by the title of this article I'm sure you can guess what happened next. There I sat, my fingers trembling slightly with anticipation as I tightened the last screw, turned the laptop over, connected the charging wire and finally, pressed the power button.

With bated breath I waited for any sign of life, any flicker of hope that maybe, just maybe, I'd managed it.

There it was.

A quiet whirring began and with a blink the screen lit up with the all-too familiar 'Lenovo' logo.

I'd done it!

For £4 I'd fixed a laptop that the so-called 'professionals' told me was a write-off, armed only with a screw driver, a guitar pick and a YouTube video.

So, the moral of the story I suppose would be this; If you're prepared to risk it all and rely on your own intuition, and a few YouTube videos to guide you maybe consider by-passing the con artists, and the money grabbers?

Although I am by no means advocating you go and ruin your own laptops! I got quite lucky with this one, but there are a thousand and one things that could have gone wrong, especially when you're opening the laptop as someone without any experience or training.

In conclusion, if you're alright with paying extortionate prices for something that may just cost £4 to replace for the added peace of mind that you don't have to fix it yourself then by all means, spend away.