Gibsaw wrote:What do you mean "hot air gun"?
Is there a known fault/fix?
BGA issues. More or less the same fault you encounter with white iBooks, PlayStation 3s (yellow light of death on those), HP laptops using ATI chipsets... they run a little hotter than anticipated, a ball lifts and bam, you now need to either harass the board with heat to get it to reseat or more correctly, reball the chip in question. One needs a hot air gun, the other a BGA reballing station. Not such a problem on newer gear but crikey, five years ago had you invested in a BGA reballing station there would have been a tidy profit in repairing boards. To this day an HP board to suit a Touchsmart tx2 convertible is around $1k new, that's not far off the price of the station...
And I know your pain on the drives asci. I just inherited a PS3, boots but no video. Guy had swapped the hard drive and updated the firmware to see if that'd help and made it all worse. Turns out the Bluray drive had been replaced so of course now it doesn't match the board and the machine has essentially locked out. So unless the hacking community come up with a method to downgrade from 4.31, the unit is now a rather fetching doorstop.
Just the local Commodore hobo and middle-aged PC hoarder.
eisa on Trademe. A lasting reminder of a Compaq fetish when I was younger.