I semi-fixed my laptop's GPU. I was able to boot it into Windows a couple of times, but games would cause it to crash out pretty quickly. It's showing graphical corruption again, so it's back to its old tricks. At least I have a chance of getting it to work again, at least for a while (perhaps until I can afford to replace it).
My "solution" was to blast it with a heatgun. I got it hot enough that the plastic covering the bottom of the heatsink bracket looked like this:
Looking back, wearing some kind of mask would have probably been a good idea. Or, perhaps, getting that plastic off first.
I have to give Dell a
ton of credit for that particular laptop design. I've taken apart quite a few laptops, but I've never worked on one as intuitive as that one. I don't know about the 15" models (not going to take apart my mom's E1505 unless I have a good reason to; I don't want her to have to be without the comforts of Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies
) but the two 17" models that I own (the Inspiron 9300 and the E1705) are absolutely incredible machines to work on. Need to replace the keyboard? Pop off the bezel, unscrew the keyboard, unplug the keyboard, put the new one in. I've seen some designs -- I believe Sony was notorious for this -- that required you to strip the system to the motherboard just to replace the damn keyboard.
The best part is how easy it is to replace the CMOS battery if you need to. This is something that escapes many laptop manufacturers, and is something that Dell made incredibly difficult on systems such as the Inspiron 1520 line (the 1520 and 1521 are pieces of shit, by the way -- that's when Dell decided that the Studio line would fill the role of the high-end Inspirons of yore). In the case of the 9300 and E1705, all you have to do is lift up the keyboard and it's right effing there. In most cases you have to physically remove the motherboard from the case. Bizarre, really.
But anyway, that was a hell of a tangent. I'm going to bed now.
