Craigslist ads transmitted in to space

2,049,215 craigslist ads were successfully transmitted on 26 July 2005 at 9:40pm EDT.

Yes, it is true.

Full story & updates:
http://raleigh.craigslist.org/about/space.html

Toshiba A15 Heat Issues

A Toshiba A15 laptop came in for repair this week. It was giving a heat warning in Windows.

We diagnosed this one with a bad fan. Upon our customer's approval we ordered the fan, installed it and gave it back to the customer.

A few A15 laptops have come in with heat issues recently. It appears these fans wear out fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, these fans are pricey and run around $90 - $129.

Sell your Laptop

Going to sell your laptop? We will offer to purchase it from you.

Sometimes if a laptop is broken and the owner decides not to repair it, we will offer to purchase the laptop.

Now if your laptop is in good working coniditon and you decide to sell your laptop you wlil get the most out of it by selling it directly to another individual,l but we do purchase them on a regular basis at a reasonable price.

If you are going to sell your laptop and you would like us to give you a quote on it, just contact us here: http://absoluteraleigh.com/contact_info.html.

Cheap New Laptops Being Sold This Holiday Season...

Well there are quite a few laptops being sold this holiday season that are brand new and are priced very low. Some of the advertisements are very misleading.

One of the major retailers out there is selling a brand new Compaq laptop for around $400. Now, this is one of those times where you get what you pay for. These are equipped with a Celeron 1.3Ghz. Those processors must be worth about $5. The rest of the specs are not impressive.

If you are looking for a decent system for under $500 you would be better off with a used ThinkPad. For example, this month we will be selling IBM ThinkPad T23 laptops for $450. They have a P3M 1.2Ghz processor, a 40GB hard drive, XP Pro, DVD, etc.

Neither one of these systems are for everyone. Think of what you will be using the system for and get a little more than what you need. If you must get a new laptop check out IBM's ThinkPad laptops at IBM.com.

Raleigh, NC- Laptop Sales for the Holidays

Well the holidays are coming and we are stocking up on quality used laptops to sell for the holiday season.

The large retailers will have some very low priced new laptops out there although some have such low specs you will get a faster and more reliable machine by buying a used laptop from us. More on that in the next blog post though.

For the month of December we will be selling 2 models in specific. They are the IBM ThinkPad T23 which is a Pentium 3 1.2Ghz. They are very reliable and weigh in at 5.5lbs. They have a very nice keyboard for typing, a keyboard light, XP Pro, 40GB Hard Drive, DVD player & more. They're going to be around $475.

Laptop #2 is a Dell C640. They are off of corporate lease and are nice machines. They have internal wireless, a Pentium 4 M 2Ghz CPU, DDR memory, DVD, XP Pro, 20GB hard drive and more. There will be around $499.

Charlotte NC Laptop Repair

Looking for laptop repair in Charlotte, NC, many people have found us recently. We offer free diagnostics, competitive pricing and most importantly an accurate diagnosis. We are a bit down the road from Charlotte; sending a laptop here via FedEx Ground is about $10 and the laptop arrives here the next day. We are located in Cary, NC, which is southwest of Raleigh. People from Charlotte drive their laptop in sometimes although with the price of gas, dropping it off at the local FedEx is both time saving and money saving.

We check most units out in 48hrs at no charge and give a quote and on some occasions we offer the customer multiple options.

If you live in Charlotte and would like us to do a free diagnostic on your laptop please go here for instructions on shipping your system (http://www.absoluteraleigh.com/national_laptop_repair.html) or go here for driving directions: http://www.absoluteraleigh.com/directions.html.

Ibuypower Laptop Repair and Driver Problems

An "Ibuypower" laptop came in for repair here last week. This computer was shutting off and misbehaving in general.

The laptop had a couple of problems. One, the hard drive was bad. Two, it was shutting off due to overheating. Cleaning the exhaust out and applying new heat transfer paste to the processor cured the overheating issue. Replacing the hard drive cured the bad hard drive problem. Then the FUN began!

Well, trying to find drivers was just a blast. ATI's drivers would not work on the Ibuypower laptop. We had to find some aftermarket video driver made by a gaming site. Taking apart the laptop revealed the wireless card was an Intel 2200BG card and we obtained the driver from Intel's website. The modem, sound and Ethernet were not identifiable. So here we have this almost new Pentium M 1.5Ghz laptop w/ Centrino sitting here with no sound and no way to get on a network.

We looked up and called Ibuypower. They actually refused to give us the driver. We told them we were a repair center and then called again pretendign to be a home user. They absolutely refused to give us drivers or even tell us the name of the products used in the laptop. That forced us to dig deeper. You see, we will figure out every problem but when companies like that make us work a little harder it just takes the fun out of it all.

Anyways, we dug. It turns out that the ibuypower laptop is an ACER laptop with their sticker on it. That is correct, the ibuypower laptop is an acer laptop. So, we just went to Acer's website and downloaded the drivers for their laptop. They even had the same model #.

Ibuypower Laptop Repair and Driver Problems

An "Ibuypower" laptop came in for repair here last week. This computer was shutting off and misbehaving in general.

The laptop had a couple of problems. One, the hard drive was bad. Two, it was shutting off due to overheating. Cleaning the exhaust out and applying new heat transfer paste to the processor cured the overheating issue. Replacing the hard drive cured the bad hard drive problem. Then the FUN began!

Well, trying to find drivers was just a blast. ATI's drivers would not work on the Ibuypower laptop. We had to find some aftermarket video driver made by a gaming site. Taking apart the laptop revealed the wireless card was an Intel 2200BG card and we obtained the driver from Intel's website. The modem, sound and Ethernet were not identifiable. So here we have this almost new Pentium M 1.5Ghz laptop w/ Centrino sitting here with no sound and no way to get on a network.

We looked up and called Ibuypower. They actually refused to give us the driver. We told them we were a repair center and then called again pretendign to be a home user. They absolutely refused to give us drivers or even tell us the name of the products used in the laptop. That forced us to dig deeper. You see, we will figure out every problem but when companies like that make us work a little harder it just takes the fun out of it all.

Anyways, we dug. It turns out that the ibuypower laptop is an ACER laptop with their sticker on it. That is correct, the ibuypower laptop is an acer laptop. So, we just went to Acer's website and downloaded the drivers for their laptop. They even had the same model #.

Compaq N600c

A Compaq N600c laptop came in for repair recently. The laptop itself was in great shape but it had an error booting in to Windows 2000.

A drive fitness test revealed that the hard drive in the machine had bad sectors. This basically means that the hard drive was bad. The user's data (in this case) was salvageable.

Bad hard drives are common in laptops. The drives have parts moving in them at up to 7,200RPM (at this point in time, someday they're be faster and using a different technology). laptops get bumped and moved around often which results in wear and tear, kind of like the moving parts on your car, like the tires. Well, maybe that isn't a great analogy, but anyways...

After being given the sizes and pricing our customer went with a 30GB hard drive. We installed Win2000 back on to his unit along with all of the drivers.

Dell C640 Sale

In abnout 1 or 2 weeks, just in time for Christmas, we'll have Dell C640s available.

They are not the flashiest laptop around but they do pack a punch and the sale price will be right. They are around $500 and have internal wireless, a P4M 2Ghz processor, 256MB RAM, DVD and some other neat features.

We normally do not sell a lot of Dell stuff although the C640 laptops seem to be fairly decent...

T23 Laptop Sale

We have several IBM ThinkPad T23 laptop computers available for sale at the moment.

They are 2647-8RU models which means, P3M 1.2Ghz, 512MB RAM, 40GB Hard Drive, Win XP Pro, all in the ThinkPad T-series package.

They're under $500 and going FAST.

Blog Updates!

Hi Everyone!

Sorry for the lack of updates to our blog recently. We have just been SWAMPED here. An update was posted a few times but when we submitted it to blogger, it ate it and it was gone. =(

Anyways, we'll try to update the blog here a little today and more this weekend.