Naughty or Nice?
Wednesday, December 12, 2007


I'm making a list and checking it twice...

posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 8:29 PM, ,


FS Used Laptops 12-2007

It had been too long sine we updated our laptop page. We have several T20 and T23 laptops available as shown on the laptop page here.

posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 8:18 PM, ,


Winbook/Sotec Laptop Repair
Tuesday, December 11, 2007


A laptop came in for repair from one of our resellers today- they have a small shop here in the area and bring all of their laptop repairs here, as many of the other stores in the area do. This one was an "unknown laptop" that "wouldn't turn on".

We immediately recognized it as a Sotec. The unit had a power issue- it ended up the power pin in the jack was broken. The laptop's motherboard was not getting any power at all. We were able to repair the laptop under one of our flat rate repairs.

We get quite a few Winbook and Sotec laptops in- we had a Winbook J4 in this week, too- they're pretty common around here.

posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 6:42 PM, ,


Lenovo 3000 V200 Bad Power Jack


When one of our local customers learned of our flat rate power jack repair repair service he brought in his Lenovo 3000 V200 laptop. Were we in for a surprise. We carry nearly every jack ever made, but not this one. Nobody had this one for sale. Not yet, anyways.

We built an external female power receptacle for this unit.

Eventually the jacks will be available and this will probably be a unit that we see fairly often. Even if the jack never becomes available, we'll be happy to repair this model under the flat rate.

posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 6:31 PM, ,


Matt Secrest, Geensboro, NC

Wanted: Information about Matt Searcrest.

Does Matt Secrest exist?

Noelle Moore, AKA Noelle Secrest, says he does exist, and that it is her husband. SHE is wanted for passing bad checks all over North Carolina. 2, 3, 4, $500 checks. She has been doing it for 18months now.
Details:
http://absoluteraleigh.com/blog/2006/07/noelle-moore-writes-bad-checks.html

Please contact us with any information you may have.

posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 6:16 PM, ,


Crippled Western Digital Hard Drives Unacceptable
Friday, December 07, 2007

Wow. Western Digital’s new network drives are crippled. WD is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to “unverifiable media license authentication”.

So, what exactly are the network drives going to be used for? Sharing DOC files? I'm sure customers will be beating down our doors trying to get one of these drives.

We sell Hitachi here, anyways.

We saw this news today on Wired here.

A list of files that can not be shared is available on WD's site here.

Tell WD how you feel about this here.

posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 12:35 PM, ,


Craigslist Laptop Repair
Thursday, December 06, 2007


Oh no. Some of these people actually believe that they're HELPING people.

We really do not want to publicly call other people names, but some of these people are just plain stupid.

Have you watched American Idol? Take the monkey kid for example. That poor kid actually believed he was going to be the next Frank Sinatra. Everyone is good at something, but this kid was way off base. How do people get so lost?

Today, someone brought to our attention a Craigslist post here in the Raleigh area. This guy praises himself as the laptop repair expert. Now this... This is the funny part. Above is one of his images that he uses- he calls the tool in the picture his special and "proper tool" for repairing laptops. That is a picture of an $8 soldering iron from Radio Shack. Only a complete idiot would use that on a innocent customer's laptop. For example, we use soldering equipment here. Was our tool $8? No. We have over $15,000.00 invested into soldering equipment.

We used to post ads on services online such as Craigslist, but these people would just steal our ads. So, we've completely refrained from using sites like Craigslist in an attempt to separate ourselves from these dreamers. In the end, it is all word of mouth.

The tragedy of all of this is the service that the end user gets. We opened our company to offer genuine solutions and help people. We try to offer affordable, cost effective laptop repair solutions.

Anyways, we do not want to sit here and flame newbies all day long. We just wanted to enter a blog post that sets the record straight. We'll probably link to this post in the future.

As a final note, using an $8 soldering iron like this on a laptop will heat the board up too much. This will weaken the solder joints of other components on the motherboard. It is possible to perform some repairs with that type of tool but it is not a good idea. Using our equipment we can remove and replace solder in a few seconds. Using one of the $8 tools will expose the laptop's motherboard to heat for an extended period of time. We've had people tell us it took "hours" to repair a problem using one of these tools. We get laptops in that people have attempted to repair using equipment like this and it is just a mess. This is just one of literally hundreds of examples we could point out when an amateur gets involved with laptop repair.

posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 7:20 PM, ,


Dell Vostro Video Card YY634 Not Available
Tuesday, December 04, 2007

We've had more Vostro laptops in for repair recently. The most recent unit needs a video card, P/N YY634. The card isn't available!

The unit is sitting here collecting dust. Dell hopes to have the cards in 2008, until then any Vostro with a bad video card is pretty much useless at the moment..

posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 12:37 PM, ,