Loading…
5
The old guy at a Tucson repair shop who made me redo a thermal paste job three times
About 6 months ago I was helping out at a small shop in Tucson and this retired tech named Walt kept hovering while I worked on an old ThinkPad that was cooking itself. I slapped on new thermal paste and called it good, and he just looked at it and said "do it again, you put too much and you smeared it like butter on toast." I redid it, he shook his head, made me redo it a third time until the spread was clean and thin. Then he sat down and told me he had been doing board level repair since the 80s and the reason he was so picky is that a bad paste job had cost a customer a CPU and him a week of his life tracking down a weird random shutdown. That stuck with me way more than any video or guide ever did, because he made me feel the mistake instead of just telling me about it. We ended up talking for like an hour after closing about the old days of cap replacement and how he never trusted a machine that passed the first stress test. I still do my paste jobs slower now and actually check the spread before I bolt the cooler down. Has anyone else had an old timer at a shop drill a habit into you that you still follow to this day?
0 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In0 Comments
No comments yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this discussion.