blog.michal-wt.com

If you have been following my social media You have seen I have fixing some electronics last time. One of them was my old Dell Inspiron 7566 laptop. It had problems with the touchpad, keyboard and a swollen battery.

Except Dell I brought back to the new life two smartphones – LG G6 and Samsung Galaxy S7 – they are alive and work like new. I’m motivated by education reasons, ecology and zero waste trends. I decided to give a new life for some devices and learn something new.

I repaired touchpad, changed the keyboard with palmrest and I changed termal pads, termal paste under heat pipe. Everything after that worked much better than before. I decided to buy a new battery.

And…

I bought a new battery from a trusted source – a Polish authorized GreenCell store – battery has a CE certificate and is approved to use in Europe. Approved by governments but not accepted by Dell.

This laptop has very efficient components:

CPU: Intel I7 6700HQ, 16GB RAM memory (expandable to 32GB), 128 GB SSD hard drive + 500GB HDD drive, dedicated GPU Nvidia GTX 960. That stuff may work great for many years but Dell… If you don’t buy original Dell stuff, go to hell...

I phoned to GreenCell support and they told me that there is no way to bypass Dell battery lock. What is the main problem? Original battery is much more expensive, hard to find on the Polish market and makes this repair unprofitable.

I encountered many unnecessary difficulties that I have never encountered in older laptops – access to heat pipes was very difficult – it requires complete disassembly. Disassembling older devices such as Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 15 was much easier. I disassembled and reassembled it successfully but I had to be more careful and patient.

Dell decided to glue the GPU and CPU which makes it difficult or impossible to potential change. Yep! This ecology… Want to change CPU or GPU? Destroy the motherboard...

I documented the laptop repair on my facebook profile – you can watch a timelapse video here: https://fb.watch/hXPwJ1OkBh/

Many companies and media are screaming about zero waste, climate change… What a hypocrisy… BigTech promotes ecology, recycling and other things but when you want to restore your good working device, you have to overpay which makes more profitable to buy new stuff. I was a fan of Dell laptops but now I'm not.

Soon more electronic experiments and renovations on this blog and on social media. Stay tuned and check my Twitter and Facebook. :)
That’s all now. See you on the next article!