Private client, Ipswich · June 2026
Laptop drive replacement and battery swap
The problem
A four-year-old laptop taking several minutes to reach the desktop, with a battery that had swollen enough to lift the trackpad. The client had been told it was not worth repairing.
What we did
We cloned the failing mechanical drive to an SSD before it degraded further, replaced the swollen battery, and cleaned and repasted the cooling assembly.
The outcome
Boot time went from over three minutes to under fifteen seconds for a fraction of the cost of replacement, and the swollen battery — a genuine fire risk — was disposed of safely.
A swollen laptop battery is one of the few faults we treat as urgent regardless of what else is going on. It had lifted the trackpad enough to be visible from the outside, which means it had been building for months.
The rest was routine: clone the drive while it still reads reliably, fit an SSD, clean out four years of dust. The machine was not, as the client had been told, beyond saving.
Services used
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