Repair

Bad elecrolytic capacitors again

Why modern high tech electronics fail? Very often the reason for that is electrolytic capacitor failure. Bad electrolytic capacitors on my PC again. The PC stated acting bad. It kept resetting my itself and quickly failed to boot. So I had to start fault-finding. In this kind of cases, the problems could be bad contact

Battery teardowns

3x Battery Teardown article shows you what is inside different batteries. So if you open up a 9 V battery, you find 6 thin 1.5 V cells inside. But what was inside that lantern battery, the rechargeable PP3, or the funny shaped lump on the back of my laptop? Check 3x Battery Teardown article to see. If you

40 ways to fix your PC

40 ways to fix your PC before you call an expert gives useful tips troubleshooting PCs. Those tips could be useful to those who are regularly called upon as the ‘IT expert’ by friends and family whenever a computer goes bust.

Laptop key fixing

One key was damaged on my ACER 5552G laptop keyboard. The S key was literally falling apart every now and them (was damaged by too kid trying to pull the key out). Sending the laptop to repair center felt something that could cost quite a bit of money (usually this kind of problems are repairs

Contact cleaner repairs remote controls

Last weekend I repaired two unreliable radio remote controllers with contact spray. One of the remotes was for Nikko RC car and other was for mains outlet remote controlling (bought from Clas Ohlson). In the Nikko remote has small joystick like controls, but underneath them there was just small cheap buttons on the circuit board.

We Need a Fixer Movement?

You’ve heard about the “maker movement,” the geeks who’ve been rebooting America’s craft tradition. The same kind of movement is also happening in other countries, including Finland. Wired writes that We Need a Fixer (Not Just a Maker) Movement. We need to use our maker skills to something new: We need to apply those maker

Fiber-optic testing

Fiber-optic testing: Keeping it simple in the field article tells in the telecommunications industry today, testing is one of the most confusing and misunderstood phases of installing a fiber-optic system. While misunderstood, optical-fiber testing is one of the final and most important procedures in installing optical networks.

Panasonic PT-AE900E noise solving

I had been getting some intermittent noise from my Panasonic PT-AE900E video projector after some years of usage. It sounded like a dry bearing on a fan, but it turned out that it was iris that caused the problem. I decided to take a more look at this problems when I had time to change

Sparkpen to discharge capacitors safely

A suitable tool to safely discharge capacitors is needed when you want to work with circuits that have dangerous voltages inside them. Typical examples of such devices mains powered switch mode power supplies (you need to safely discharge main capacitor) and different cameras (the flash unit has a large capacitor charged to 400-500V voltage). Those