Technician, Heal Thyself....'s Computer

Ok, so it was risky, taking a soldering iron to the surface mount connections on a printed circuit board inside my laptop, but I was desperate. I had not been able to get the second RAM slot to work. The memory card is good but the slot would not recognize it unless it was pressed down toward the board. I had tried a mechanical work-around but that only had limited success.

So it was time to try the electrical fix. I figured there had to be a cracked or cold solder joint in one of the connections to the main board. Unfortunately, they are barely big enough to see, let alone attack with a hot iron 8 times bigger. I got it good and clean (solder flux is a wonderful thing) and tinned up with my best silver-bearing solder and went to work. I tried to see if the solder was heating and flowing on each connection as I went, but even with my highest mag reading glasses, I could not see them very well.

I saw an old SLR 50mm lens nearby which I had used to take some extreme closeup pictures before and thought it might work as a "jeweler's loop". I was then able to examine all of the connections and see if any looked like they were still not connected. I was able to see a few which were questionable and then work on them as I watched through the lens. finally, I think I got it properly soldered in and the memory is now working.

I was afraid for a while that I had killed my laptop. I had partially melted some of the resistors close to the connections and was getting some blue-screens on boot up. Finally it would not even go into POST. Upon further examination, I realized there may be some solder bridges between the connections, so I scraped them out with a pin and tried again. Success!