Are these laptops built to fail??? video included! [ Edited ]

[mcc]

I wish you luck, but that bracket is critical to the operation of your laptop. It should NEVER be operated without it in place. What you describe as "glue" is only thermal paste and it is only intended to fill the gap between the GPU and the heatsink.

You've removed the part of the laptop that pushes the heatsink against your GPU and then operated it for several days with little/no cooling. If you can't get it to run properly with the bracket installed you've probably fried your GPU or damaged the solder connections under it.

[Santoku]

As lead_org mentions, you may be able to reflow the solder in order to get rid of the poor joints that may have occured when the GPU overheated and reliquified the solder. Old PS3's had similar issues with overheating, and I have seen laptops come up with the same problem with CPU and GPU when they have been allowed to overheat e.g., heat vent or intake blocked for extended period of time while system running.

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

these are due to the use of lead free solder (due to EU's RoHS rule), which is not eutectic, repeated heat stress can cause stress fracture to form within the solder joints overtime.

[twek]

the laptop is working fine now, thanks to this forum, let me clear a few things up,

here is a timeline,

• laptop graphics card goes out,
• i take it half way apart, (take off the bracket in question[graphics card is already not working, the removal of the bracket did not cause this])
• few days later finnish takeing it apart, (misplace the bracket lol)
• misplace my blame and think the heatsink not touching caused the problem
• read forum, bend the bracket so that it puts more pressure on the GPU
• ???????
• PROFIT!

thanks guys!

but in my rush to get a replacement laptop i won a x61 on ebay

i love my lenovos, and will probaly just use my w500 as a desktop now that my x61 is en route lol