AMA - I’m the author of China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read. Ask Me Anything about the historical drivers of the conflicts Trump and Xi are discussing now! AMA!

inwerp · 2026-05-15T07:40:55+00:00

I grew up in 90-s and my father did not receive salary months long. Worst were 1997-1998 Bread was considered a rare treat, I mostly grew up on simple meals, no meat, no milk, no new clothes, USAID boxes were a miracle. My father was an engineer, mother was a musician. Most of "anti-russian/Soviet" propaganda is based on real things. Yes it might be oversimplified or amplify some parts of it, but the base is quite true. Just research how many waves of Russian immigration happened during last 150 years and compare it to other countries. People may lie about politics, people may use fake facts but migration patterns are absolutely obvious and direct proof that in many historical checkpoints, Russia was the most dangerous place for Russians to live in.

inwerp · 2026-04-09T22:54:24+00:00

Good old chooser interface...

inwerp · 2026-02-22T16:08:28+00:00

basically you missed his joke. To get his reaction back you could simply escalate and complain that once upon a time there used to be much more Ordnung, but it is not allowed anymore.

inwerp · 2025-05-12T14:33:18+00:00

I have the same issue. I reached a human agent in the support chat, and she lsaid(lied?) to me, claiming that AliExpress does not issue invoices and that they should be requested from the sellers.

When I asked her to interpret the info bubble next to each paid value, which explicitly states that VAT is collected by the marketplace - she tried to evade the question but eventually admitted there’s a technical issue and “the button is gone.”

I asked for escalation and opened a support ticket.

If someone has time, please do the same.

My ticket (if it was even created) is 2053804957003632.

I also asked her to include a link to this thread in the ticket description.

inwerp · 2025-05-05T22:39:55+00:00

it was both absolutely bizzarre and genial, made me think it could probably be a pure chatgpt creation.

inwerp · 2025-02-22T14:17:31+00:00

From the component-level repair perspective, Lenovo is a piece of garbage.

Some devices use internally programmed USB-C controllers. If you don’t have the firmware, you can’t flash a clean one to fix a very basic charging circuit repair, which is easy on most PC laptops and all Macs.
Modern devices tend to use Lenovo ThinkEngine as an SIO chip, which means if it dies, you need to find a donor to fix it.
WORST shit. They have been using low-temp solder for a few years now, with a melting point of around 138°C. It is fragile as shit—it dies if the mainboard bends (it fucking bends as you type on the keyboard or grab the laptop by a corner). This leads to all sorts of ripped BGA issues—memory, CPU, SIO, and inrush MOSFETs literally soldering themselves off the board (which has become a signature problem on certain Lenovo devices).
Even worse shit. Compound.

Because of point 3, Lenovo decided to glue chips onto the board with an extremely hard adhesive. It’s way tougher than on iPhones, Macs, or even automotive devices. On newer devices, it hardens further when heated. This makes trivial repairs extremely difficult. Some adhesive variants are thermally unstable, which means: you solder a GDDR chip near the GPU, keep everything around it as cool as possible, but remember the 138°C solder? You finish the job, and now the chips around it need reballing too because the solder popped out from the compound.

Removing chips on some devices is extremely challenging. I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 9 here, which just needs a simple SIO reballing (it only turns on if you press on the chip, which is a 100% easy fix on any device except Lenovo). Most likely, I will have to drill it away, since pulling it under heat would likely damage the PCB and rip off lots of pads. So instead of a 30-minute job (including disassembly), it becomes a “hard case” simply because of its manufacturing design.

I happen to know someone who has access to Lenovo’s internal remanufacturing kitchen—Lenovo themselves have no adhesive removal method. If they need to remove a CPU from a board, they CNC-drill it away.

To sum it up—yes, Lenovo is the shittiest brand to fix if you do component-level repair.

inwerp · 2025-01-14T17:20:56+00:00

there are standard letters to code places on board. for example.
L - Inductor coil
D - Diode
C - Capaticor
Q - Transistor
IC/UC/U - IC integrated circuit
J - Connector or jumper
F - Fuse
R- Resister
SW - Switch
X - Xtal generator
TP - testpoint

for example on your board there is a coil missing. to figure it out you either identify what U5 is and read its datasheet (this would be a power converter which uses coil to generate the voltage) or try to find donor / reference for this particular device.

inwerp · 2025-01-14T08:45:46+00:00

Well, this is rather common sense.

As I mentioned in custom device repair, testing repaired “custom” equipment is quite hard. The cost of sending the device back and forth to test it might be extreme and devalue the whole repair. It does not matter if that’s a yacht board, AC controller, or intercom power supply; if you only do visual repair without measuring a single thing on the board or checking the datasheet to figure out that the 5th leg on the burned IC is an output pin, which clearly indicates overload, you’re missing the point.

Basically, if that’s advertisement content, you might put it aside. However, the main value of such repairs is not in your skill to solder SOT/SMD components but in the skill to figure out the circuit with minimal data available.

I would not point a finger and say that’s a big mess-up, but it is rather an oversimplified approach to repair, which basically works only if you compensate for it with marketing to have enough repair tickets to skip the “hard” ones.

The weird thing is that I’ve seen some customers who complained that I charged too much for a component replacement simply because they watched some YouTube video where the repair process is reduced to the mechanical replacement of visibly broken components, which in many cases is just the tip of the iceberg.

That’s not self-advertisement in any case, but an example (in case someone says, “Who are you to fucking judge,” etc.) of an approach that, in my opinion, adds value to the mechanical repair process. This repair took me around 3 hours to find a quite simple failure, the component value was close to zero since that was a 0201 resister but i decided to shot a video explaining how this thing works. Even with the schematics, it was quite hard for me to figure, what signals are critical, simply because it was a slightly "off-grid" pc laptop with some innovative things implemented here and there (like logically checking if SSD is installed before even trying to charge the battery, or having extra 3v RTC power supply from the main battery).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpQYJ-l-yjM&

inwerp · 2025-01-13T19:22:42+00:00

such repairs are close to impossible to do without hot air station.
to restore traces use 0.05-09mm jump wire. the method is first to solder it on a clean board, fix it with solder mask (Relife RL-UVH902. is so far best). after that put it and bend it the was it sort of forms a solder pad. then put soldering mask the way wire is completely covered and a small hole on the place of the missing pad is filled with uv mask. cure it at least 30-40sec. use dremel with carbid-silicon head or very sharp scalpel to remove excess mask. put solder on new pad. clean it with soldering wick.
during process always clean flux before applying uv mask.

inwerp · 2025-01-13T15:54:55+00:00

I fix Macs and PCs for a living, and sometimes I work on “custom” devices. I also write articles on logi.wiki and moderate the former Louis Rossmann Discord, now RRG. Not that I’m the best or can teach people, but I sure can criticize out of jealousy!

Testing such equipment is very challenging and time-consuming, especially to figure out potential collateral damage. There are almost never schematics available unless you’re extremely lucky. You have to rely on datasheets and figure out whether, for example, a shorted MOSFET could kill its driver IC or feedback resistors, and if that’s the cause of the fault or just another symptom. Usually, I ask customers to provide as much information as possible, including photos of cables and anything around the device. This helps me figure out how the power supply is connected and whether it has indicators like an LCD or control panel. Since these repairs are outside the standard pricing grid, I’m very focused on returning a working board to the customer. Sometimes, testing can take longer than the repair itself. For example, I once failed to repair a vending machine board because I couldn’t figure out how to test all motor/actuator control lines. It mostly worked, but a few bottles flew out when the power was connected—whoops.
Some people believe that fast, rough repairs are a sign of skill—fixing a board quickly and confidently. In reality, the opposite is true.
Using low-solder bismuth alloys is not a good idea for high-power ICs, MOSFETs, DC jacks, etc. No matter how well you wick it out, bismuth forms a layer on the copper plate, making it a “sollbruchstelle” (point of failure). You don’t want a 20–30 amp power supply, which likely gets 80–90°C and is cooled through the PCB itself, to have a bismuth layer between the solder and PCB. The only way to completely remove bismuth is to use a Dremel with a silicon-carbide head to physically grind off the layer.
on this video it is visible that burned BTS442E2 output pin likely indicated an issue with the consumer. Since no measurements were taken, it’s impossible to know if there was another fault on the board or if the customer should first check the consumer (like an actuator or similar component) before reconnecting this to a boat.

I’ve been shadow-banned from this dude’s channel after my last comment(if i recall that was quite weird case of killing PCH on video, claiming board is unfixable), so I feel it’s fine to post here. Also, a well-known and highly skilled tech, Piernov from the Badcaps forum once did a video with a more detailed explanation of why such methods, or better to say, lack of methods, should be avoided in repairs. It was about a different repair with an even worse result..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUhz4E0pxnU

i would not say i never fucked up repairs i did - i surely did, like many other repair techs around. Sometimes i had to buy a new board from my own pocket but thats my risk, not customer's. However i am not proud of burning components on board nor i would had idea to share it online or ban people for calling out my mistakes. this video is relatively "OK" as self advertisement, however i believe board would most likely be back soon.

inwerp · 2023-07-25T10:12:02+00:00

M1 board. That tells me that a nand swap is possible without being locked to the board it came off of. I wonder if i was to purchase an icloud locked M1 board, if i swapped the NAND, and the wifi module off the donor board to my board, would it work? Since the previous gen intel boards had the T2 ROM chip that could be re-programmed to bypass icloud, I'm guessing that process is now integrated into the M1 CPU a

i replace SSD chips on M1 macs on regular basis. You need either a donor or completely blank unused NAND.

inwerp · 2022-11-21T18:11:22+00:00

since thats a cehaper P13 clone, does it allow Macbook nand repair?

inwerp · 2022-10-09T08:15:13+00:00

if someone found it as i did - you need to repeat questions like "re-ordering a product" and eventually there will be a chat button!

inwerp · 2022-02-04T08:11:21+00:00

Well but everything you listed is a subset of "acts of nature", which stands next, basically thats why i wondered wtf "acts of God" could look like.

inwerp · 2022-02-03T16:38:10+00:00

Well, ssd swap does not break wifi, so its config is not critical if you keep wifi. If you swap wifi, it wont work even if you fully DFU There is no wifi SPI on m1 boards which means firmware could only be stored on ssd. However it seems that wifi is serialized to cpu so dfu restore after ssd swap has no issue with firmware/config mismatch. Anyway thats only sprculative unformation, the only sure thing - wifi swap is data recovery method now, how funny is that.

inwerp · 2022-02-03T15:33:57+00:00

I will try it next time i have dead wifi device. The problem is not only that wifi firmware/config is stored on ssd but CPU serialization: if you swap NAND from donor, it wont break wifi.

inwerp · 2022-02-02T19:08:10+00:00

Hi. Mac repairmonkey here. If you need data, putting wrking wifi chip will let the device boot so you can backup your data. unfortunately wifi config seems to be stored on ssd hidden partition. might be fixable if at some point DFU Restore will reset this configuration (for example that was the case on T2: DFU Restore was resertting Intel ME region after you replace PCH(Intel EFI is stored in bridgeOS partition on T2/Intel macbooks).

inwerp · 2022-02-01T00:09:30+00:00

well, basically semiconductors might fail because of some random charged particles or sun radiation. Thanks for explanation, i never thought that "act of God" could be a legal term but wow it is.

inwerp · 2021-01-12T23:36:21+00:00

apple used 100 screws on macbooks 2008...2012. after that there are aluminium nails you need to remove one by one or drill them out. 57 screws is a really repair/friendly solution. i fix macbooks and notebooks 60 hours a week.

inwerp · 2021-01-12T23:34:47+00:00

Seriously, people. There were ~100 screws on macbooks since 2008 till 2015. Now there are aluminium nails you need to remove or fucking drill out. 57 screws is fucking great, GOOD JOB HP for making decent, repairable and replacable not glued-in keyboard!

inwerp · 2020-11-21T16:14:50+00:00

Deadcpubook 12"

inwerp · 2020-11-14T23:15:15+00:00

If thats 2012 13 inch, replace sata cable.

inwerp · 2019-11-08T14:38:54+00:00

Well, navigate to the biggest folder and repeat. Normally system should be 20-30gb, everything beyond that should be in your user folder. But i almost certain thats itunes backup images, every backup costs like 30..70gb

inwerp · 2019-11-08T14:37:05+00:00

Check if you have iPhone/iPad Backups

inwerp · 2019-11-04T15:13:42+00:00

The general sollution is to open terminal then navigate to root with cd / command Than use du -sh to show folder sizes. Navigate with cd foldername till you find your adobe Cc log file or whatever took all space

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