I Bought A Broken R500 For Repair

[TPFanatic]

Poor thing was listed (A) grade in a bulk lot, but was missing a lot of stickers and clearly had taken fall damage, as inspection revealed a messed up hinge, broken magnesium frame, and a PUNCTURE in the main heatpipe caused by the broken hinge, which has evidently damaged the poor Celeron 575 as it cannot run an OS and it overheats just in Memtest 86+.

So I don't care about refunds, the laptop was so cheap it was basically free, and I love the seller and what they do, I've bought computer parts from them before for YEARS. They're good people and I can fix the laptop.

I have decided to REPAIR the laptop by purchasing a secondhand P8400 CPU for all of $6. In my younger experience using a T500 with P8600 and playing with TPFC at Fan Speed 0, a P8400 is cool-headed enough to effectively be passive-cooled by the heatsink. I will update this thread when the new brainz has arrived and I can install OS.

1/3/2025:

i took delivery of an R61i and wound up cannibalizing some of the R500 parts for the R61i, such as the palmrest, CMOS battery, and keyboard. the parts fit together well enough and i'm like the R61 enough that i'm probably not going to continue refurbbing the R500.