The Lance J. Technoweb

I repair A1342 MacBooks, and so I know them quite well.  They can be wonderful machines, even in 2018.  Here is my advice for the diagnosis and repair of the A1342 series of machines. Brief Overview The A1342 is the only polycarbonate Unibody MacBook.  There are two revisions: late 2009, and mid-2010.  These revisions have interchangeable parts.   The only significant difference is the CPU clock speed.  The machine's general design (and performance) is very similar to the 2010 MacBook Pro. A1342 manufacturing was discontinued in early 2012. No-Start / Totally Dead Machine This is almost always due to liquid ingress through the keyboard.  Often times water will kill the keyboard, but everything else will be just fine.  The best way to check it out is to remove the back cover and try to start the machine by briefly shorting the jumper pads with a pair of steel tweezers.  When shorted for about 1 second, the fan should spin up and the ...

My Dustbuster vacuum - a CHV-1410, gets a lot of use.  We use it several times per day, every day.  It is a workhorse. Sadly, it was becoming unreliable.  It would be fully charged, and I'd hit the switch and maybe it would begin to start and then stop, or it would lurch and stop - or maybe it would do nothing. My CHV-1410 had a broken switch At first I thought it was the battery, but then I found that by carefully wiggling the switch I was sometimes able to get the vacuum to work.  All that on-off action over the years made the switch unreliable. Instead of throwing away an otherwise perfectly good vacuum, I decided to replace the worn switch.  It's an easy and worthwhile repair with the right part. The one special part needed: A specific $5 Switch There seems to be two types of switches used in these, based on the charging mechanism: For the Lithium models (CHV-1410L and similar), I notice that there are only two conductors are attached to the sw...

Here's my procedure on how to remove and replace the logic board of an HP Pavilion DV6. My model is a DV6-3122US, and many DV6s of the 3000 series are similar. These machines often fail to start due to a motherboard failure.  With a motherboard failure, upon pressing power the fan will first spin and the power light comes on.  The capslock key will flash white once every 4 seconds, and the f12 key will stay a solid orange, and the screen - although powered up - displays black only. Although the caps lock "single blink" indicator at boot implies a CPU failure, in my experience it is not due to the CPU itself but the supporting components on the motherboard. The only solid solution is to repair or replace the motherboard.  Replacement boards are readily available.  I bought one and replaced it myself. Disassembly Procedure NOTE: The screws are different sizes, and its important to reinstall them correctly.  I color-coded the different screws in the photos...