Dell D600 Broken mainboard and locked BIOS ...
 

About a week or two ago I received a portable back from a colleague which I sold him about a year ago. I didn't booted at al any more.

The power led lit up, but then it faded out. I first thought the false contact somewhere, but after taking the portable apart nothing weird appeared, and testing it outside the casing gave the same problems. After testing with spares it was the mainboard.

I went looking on Ebay for a replacement, but they cost about 100 euro there. Finally I stumbled upon a board, but the advertised stated that the supervisor password was locked. I found some tricks on the net on how to force the CMos clear on these boards, but that didn't work out as I hoped. 50 euro again down the drain ?

No, I decided to desolder the chip from the broken board and solder it onto the board that posted, but ten locked on the password.

The soldering: (The soldering seems to be done dirty, but actually it's quit nice - the chip size is about 3 to 4 mm).

so you fixed the lappy for €50 ?

For 43 euro to be correct, and got some extra spare parts such as a new body casing (in good condition and a Banias 1,6 Ghz CPU that came with the mainboard)

http://cgi.benl.ebay.be/ws/eBayISAPI...MEWN:IT&ih=010

made any other pics of the restauration? looks like a nice howto guide for fixing old laptops 101 :)

Not really. Once I get another one to assemble I'll make pictures and then we'll be able to add this.