Laptop repair

With the repair done on my motherboard, I figured I'd take a look at an old laptop I still had laying around. It's an old Acer Aspire 1510 which has an nvidia graphics chip. The problem with it, was that the display output was all garbled. It was possible to boot it, but when it went into graphics mode, it would usually lock up pretty fast.
This is something that happens to many laptops with nvidia chips. The issue, from what I understand, is that due to the way the chipset heats up, the forces on it cause the solder joints to fracture.
These are BGA (Ball Grid Array) chips, reworking those needs specialized equipment although you can find BGA rework equipment pretty cheap on sites like aliexpress. However for a one off on an old laptop, it would still be too much and I doubt it will be easy the first time you try to reball a BGA.

Luckily, there's a cheaper and much easier way!

Basically what you can do is remove the PCB with the GFX chip and just put it in a normal oven at 200 degrees Celcius for 10 minutes. This will cause the solder joints to reflow and fix the fractures. There's plenty of youtube videos demostrating the effect. So I figured I'd give it a shot... 10 minutes later my freshly baked laptop was resurrected!