Acer 5552G reballing (was reflowed by other service)
Had this brought in along with a couple other laptops with the note "has been reflowed before, client wants reballing now". The machine powered up with no display, it did not seem to boot either. Stock hard drive made weird noises, another hard drive didn't even spin up. So this was clearly not a GPU but a NB issue.
I opened it up to find the motherboard looking like in the first pic. Both the GPU and NB had been "reflowed", amateurishly. Nothing more than waving a hot air wand over the chips most likely. The owner was charged around $45 for this job, and they even had the guts to put their company name on the rear of the laptop...
Absolutely no flux had been used anywhere, and a couple corners of the GPU were bent upwards, with the balls elongated vertically. Really ugly job. That, when the GPU had nothing to do with this issue in the first place - it was the RS880M Northbridge as usual for these boards. Then, the heatsink looked like the second pic. They used cheap paste which melted off the chips, and the pad on the Northbridge was completely broken. No wonder it didn't work for too long!
So i was forced to give another reflow to the GPU (which wasn't supposed to be reflowed in the first place), for my peace of mind. It laid itself back into place quite nicely.
Then i focused on the real issue - the RS880M Northbridge. Nothing i hadn't done before... removed, cleaned, reballed, soldered back on. Does it work now? Of course. 
I'm not really happy with the color on either the GPU or NB, but the board came in like that. What's important is that it works. I replaced the thermal pad on the NB with a new one, cleaned up that mess of paste and applied MX-4 to both CPU and GPU. That isn't pictured as i didn't want any dust to get in, sorry.
While i was happily fitting the mainboard back into the case, i noticed something wrapped in black electrical tape, with a cable going into the bluetooth module. I was like, "this doesn't look like an antenna". So i unwrapped the tape to discover that... umm... well... They had accidentally ripped off the BT module connector, and they were too lazy to solder it back on, so they wrapped it in tape and hid it, hoping that nobody's gonna see it. Since they had that hot air wand handy, they could have at least done SOMETHING properly with it. But no. Or they could have simply stolen the whole module - that way nobody would've figured out that it used to be there, as Acer is notorious for specifying Bluetooth but not actually installing it in their laptops. But nope, they left it hanging in there, so that the next guy who opens it up was sure to find out how lazy they are.
So yeah, some proper use of a hot air wand later, the laptop had Bluetooth once again as well. And that's about it.
I opened it up to find the motherboard looking like in the first pic. Both the GPU and NB had been "reflowed", amateurishly. Nothing more than waving a hot air wand over the chips most likely. The owner was charged around $45 for this job, and they even had the guts to put their company name on the rear of the laptop...
Absolutely no flux had been used anywhere, and a couple corners of the GPU were bent upwards, with the balls elongated vertically. Really ugly job. That, when the GPU had nothing to do with this issue in the first place - it was the RS880M Northbridge as usual for these boards. Then, the heatsink looked like the second pic. They used cheap paste which melted off the chips, and the pad on the Northbridge was completely broken. No wonder it didn't work for too long!
So i was forced to give another reflow to the GPU (which wasn't supposed to be reflowed in the first place), for my peace of mind. It laid itself back into place quite nicely.
Then i focused on the real issue - the RS880M Northbridge. Nothing i hadn't done before... removed, cleaned, reballed, soldered back on. Does it work now? Of course. I'm not really happy with the color on either the GPU or NB, but the board came in like that. What's important is that it works.
I replaced the thermal pad on the NB with a new one, cleaned up that mess of paste and applied MX-4 to both CPU and GPU. That isn't pictured as i didn't want any dust to get in, sorry.While i was happily fitting the mainboard back into the case, i noticed something wrapped in black electrical tape, with a cable going into the bluetooth module. I was like, "this doesn't look like an antenna". So i unwrapped the tape to discover that... umm... well... They had accidentally ripped off the BT module connector, and they were too lazy to solder it back on, so they wrapped it in tape and hid it, hoping that nobody's gonna see it. Since they had that hot air wand handy, they could have at least done SOMETHING properly with it. But no. Or they could have simply stolen the whole module - that way nobody would've figured out that it used to be there, as Acer is notorious for specifying Bluetooth but not actually installing it in their laptops. But nope, they left it hanging in there, so that the next guy who opens it up was sure to find out how lazy they are.
So yeah, some proper use of a hot air wand later, the laptop had Bluetooth once again as well. And that's about it.
Attached Files
(size,power and spare)
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