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Today We Repaired An Averatec 3150 Laptop.…

The machine came to us in an inop­er­a­tive state. We were also unable to get into the bios due to a lost pass­word. We diag­nosed the prob­lem to a bad hard drive. Most lap­top hard dri­ves fail due to being dropped.

After we installed a new hard drive and rein­stalled the oper­at­ing sys­tem, another prob­lem reared its ugly head. Most Aver­atec lap­tops have over­heat­ing issue’s, our machine was no excep­tion. After run­ning for a short period of time the machine would just shut down. The proces­sor was reach­ing its ther­mal limit and shut­ting down, Very Bad! After thor­oughly clean­ing the heat sinks, fans, and under­neath the key­board, we applied a fresh coat of Arc­tic Sil­ver heat sink com­pound to the CPU cooler. After reassem­bling the com­puter the prob­lem was still there.

The next log­i­cal step was to flash the Bios. We first flashed the Bios with the lat­est ver­sion, R101Z dated 3/31/2005. It’s always best to get the lat­est ver­sion of your Bios, with the excep­tion of Beta Release. We restarted the machine and hoped for the best. Unfor­tu­nately this ver­sion of Bios seemed to aggra­vate our over­heat­ing issue. We had one more option, use an older ver­sion of Bios listed on Averatec’s web­site. After updat­ing the Bios to, RD09 dated 6/30/2004, the machine runs rock solid at 40C. The tem­per­a­ture prob­lem was due to a com­bi­na­tion of dust filled heat sinks and bad Bios.

The next prob­lem we needed to address was the lack of a Bios pass­word. We had hoped that flash­ing the Bios would remove the pass­word, but no such luck. It took us awhile to even find the CMOS bat­tery, and after we found it we real­ized it was sol­dered to the moth­er­board. We then used a sol­der­ing iron to remove one of the bat­tery leads, and shorted the con­tacts on the moth­er­board. We then re-soldered the lead and reassem­bled the machine. It worked like a charm, and now were able to mod­ify the Bios.

We fin­ished off the Aver­atec with a few of our rec­om­mended free soft­ware titles, and viola our cus­tomers got a like new machine.

Update:

We’ve received quite a bit of inter­est regard­ing this repair. Appar­ently many of our users are hav­ing the same issue and have inquired about our repair. The first ques­tion is “where can I find the bios update”. It can be found here. The sec­ond ques­tion is “what util­ity do you use to read com­puter tem­per­a­tures”. We use a util­ity called Speed­Fan. You can down­load it here.

Thanks for read­ing our posts, and please feel free to ask any ques­tions you may have.