Microsoldering & Motherboard Repairs

When the obvious part has already been replaced and the fault is still there, it is on the board. The signs we see most:

• No response at all, on a battery you know is charged
• Shuts down or restarts on its own
• Still will not charge after the port or the battery was changed
• Gets hot doing nothing
• Somebody else has already told you it is unrepairable

You cannot tell from the outside which component failed, and neither can we - that is what the assessment is for. £39, or £49 if the device has been opened elsewhere, and it comes off the repair if you go ahead.

Yes - Apple, Samsung, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI, Microsoft, Google and the rest, across phones, laptops, tablets, desktops, consoles, drones and external drives.

Board-level work does not depend on the badge on the case. It depends on the components on the board and on whether the schematic and the replacement parts can be sourced, which is a question we answer during the assessment. If your device is unusual, send us a photograph of the board first and we will tell you whether it is work we take.

It depends on where the fault sits. If the cause is visible or reachable - liquid damage, a failed charging or audio IC, a damaged connector, a burnt capacitor - yes, that is routine board work and carries our standard warranty.

On the stacked-board models - iPhone X, XS, 11 and everything from the 12 onwards, except the XR and SE - a dead board with no visible cause is different: finding the fault means desoldering the two board layers apart, hours of work with real risk to the board. We do not sell that as a repair. We take it on as data recovery - realistic budget from £500, paid for your files rather than the phone, and if nothing can be recovered you pay nothing beyond the assessment fee.

Yes, and how quickly it reaches us matters more than how much liquid went in. Boards on the bench within the first day or two are usually recoverable; corrosion keeps spreading through tracks and pads for as long as the board is left.

The board is cleaned ultrasonically, the corroded components are replaced, and a protective coating goes back on before it is reassembled. Older liquid damage is often still worth assessing. More on the liquid damage page.

Usually one to five working days from the moment we have the device, and sometimes longer.

The assessment is one to three of those days. The soldering itself is often only a few hours - the rest is the queue, parts that occasionally have to be ordered, and the testing, because a board that works for five minutes is not a repair. A straightforward power fault can be finished in a couple of days; a multi-rail short after liquid damage can take a week or more. You get a real timeframe with your quote and we agree it with you before anything starts. If the job is urgent, say so and it can be moved up the queue.

We never delete anything deliberately and we do not open your files - but we cannot take responsibility for your data, and no repair shop honestly can.

Where the storage can be removed, it comes out before the board goes under the microscope and we test on a drive of our own, so yours is not in the machine while we work. Where it is soldered to the board - most phones, many recent laptops - it stays where it is and we work around it. There we have no control over it, and often no way of telling whether the data was still intact when the device arrived: a board fault is quite often the storage failing in the first place.

So back up while the device still powers on, if it does. And if the contents matter more than the device, say so before we start - that changes how we approach the board, and it may be a data recovery job rather than a repair.

You pay the assessment fee and nothing else. No repair is started until you have approved a fixed price, so there is no bill for work you did not agree to.

We tell you what we found and why we are not going ahead - whether the damage is genuinely beyond recovery, or the repair would cost more than the device is worth. Both happen, and we say which one it is. A board that cannot be brought back can usually still be read, so the data is not automatically lost with it.

Yes - six months on the work, and six to twelve months on any part we fit, depending on the supplier.

If the same fault comes back within that period we repair it again at no charge. It does not cover a new, unrelated fault, fresh physical damage, or liquid getting into the device after the repair. Full terms are on the warranty page.

One exception: board work done to recover data from a stacked phone board. There the deliverable is your files, not the handset, so the handset itself carries no warranty. You approve the work on that basis.