Environmentalism kills reliable laptops, unreliable laptops kill the environment: make your pick

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) April 25, 2010 -- 15 April, Ohrid, Macedonia: IT Certification Lounge and IT Help Desk Center joined resources to educate laptop users and help decrease IT carbon footprint. With three short booklets and a few more to come, users now have the know-how for easy and fast laptop repairs that everybody can do at home.

The logic behind this act is easy to grasp: Moore’s Law in IT predicts that PC performance doubles every 18 months, software is increasingly resource-hungry, Lead free solder alloys are brittle and cause too many failures while maintenance fees continue to grow. The users have no viable alternative than buying a new laptop and scraping the 2-3 years old Pentium Dual Core laptops. Knowing that the average carbon footprint of manufacturing and shipping one laptop is about 600 lbs (300kg) of CO2 saving laptops quickly makes a lot of environmental sense.

In the past 5 years the IT Help Desk Center noticed a growing trend of laptop failures caused by the Lead – free, brittle solder alloys enforced by the RoHS act. The most common faults in laptops produced between 2002 and 2008 (not counting software issues) are power circuitry, chipset and graphics chip solder failures. These faults manifest in totally dead laptops (LEDs blink, CPU fan spins for a second and everything shuts down), random freezeups during work (keyboard and/or mouse pointer stops responding), failure to boot (stuck at bootup manufacturer logo) and defective image (stripes on the LCD, color distortions etc).

Through online social activity, the IT Help Desk Center noticed that most of the vendor-specific repair centers suggest replacing the motherboard as the only solution for each of these problems. This usually means that customers end up paying hundreds of dollars for the repair since these failures start showing up after the one year warranty expires. But the worse issue is that less than 10% of the materials used in laptop manufacturing are recyclable, so this repair approach contributes to the immense 13 million metric tons of e-waste the world produces each year (according to the UN report for 2005).
In cooperation with the IT Certification Lounge, the IT Help Desk Center developed 3 repair tutorials (with more to come) with easy to follow, step-by-step instructions of how to recognize the problem, how to verify the diagnosis and how to repair the laptop at home, in under an hour. In just a few months These repair tutorials have helped over 16000 users to repair their laptops which translates in about 10.000.000 lbs less CO2 emissions, and cumulatively saved the general population over $5.000.000 on repair fees.

The IT Help Desk Center (http://imateski.blogspot.com) is an IT repair shop focusing on the “exotic” hardware failures and performs electronics component-level repairs.
The IT Certification Lounge (http://itclounge.wordpress.com) focuses on producing top quality IT certification training materials offering more for less.

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