When you smash your screen it’s obvious just by looking at your laptop what the issue is. But sometimes, it can be a little harder to tell. This HP laptop baffled its owners when it abruptly stopped working, but we knew what was wrong with it immediately. In fact, the problem was diagnosed without taking it apart thanks to the telltale bulge in the keyboard.  The problem?  The laptop had overheated and the battery had blown. Well, we installed a nice shiny new battery, almost half the size of the old one we took out!

Sometimes it’s tricky to know if there’s a problem with your laptop or not. Maybe Windows is painfully slow to load, maybe the whole system seems a little sluggish. You’re unsure if it’s just getting old, or if there’s an actual issue. Other times, it’s blindingly obvious not only that there’s a problem, but what the problem is. Take this lovely little purple number that came in recently, which had either inexplicably decided to communicate exclusively in Wingdings (a bizarre font made entirely of characters rather than letters), or it was suffering from a serious case of corruption. The latter was the case, and we ran corrupted file recovery on it to restore the system, but before we did it was looking a little...well...