I have an old dell d300xt laptop that was given to me.
I got it running by throwing away the battery (it was bad and when it was plugged in, it would prevent the laptop from even turning on) and by sticking in an old 10 gig drive (ironically, the laptop drive is an ex apple ibook drive, has the apple logo on the drive and everything).
Anyway, it is a nice little clunker, only has 64 megs of ram, but i was planning on buying another 64 meg edo sodimm off ebay so that i could replace the win98 with win2k. I like it because its fairly small which is nice for wardriving.
anyway, i was using it and then let it do a throuough (sp?) scandisk. When I came back to it a couple of hours later, it was shut off. It would no longer power up either by a/c or a known good battery so i took it apart.
Sure enough, the mmc-1 cpu card had a nice big ole black spot from where it burned fast and furiously.
There is no apparent damage to the underside of the chip and no visible damage to the motherboard or anything else.
Here is a pic of the chip:
You can see the visible damage on the lower left corner of the pic.
What do you think the chances are of getting away with just buying a replacment cpu from ebay? (they aare only around 10-60 dollars depending on how fast i want to go).
it was probably a cooling problem in the first place, but buying a slower cpu will probably fix that
Doesn't look like a cooling problem. Looks like a short, could be caused by a loose connector, a random loose screw, bad handaling (clumbsy? I killed my P-II laptop in the same way... fried the card after I droped it...), or any combonation of the above.