Every laptop repairing service we run, and what each one really involves
Eight benches, one standard. Below is what happens on each of them — the symptoms that bring a machine in, the work that goes into the repair, and what it costs. Every job carries the same free diagnosis, the same fixed written quote and the same 12-month warranty.
- From
- £109
- Turnaround
- Often same day
- Warranty
- 12 months
Laptop screen replacement
A laptop display is not one part. It is a panel, a backlight, an eDP ribbon, a bezel, a pair of hinges and — on touch machines — a bonded digitiser. Fitting "a screen that fits" is why so many replacement displays come back washed out, dim, or with a touch layer that no longer registers.
We match by panel part number, not by size. That means the resolution, refresh rate, brightness in nits, colour gamut, connector pin count and mounting pattern all match what left the factory. If your machine shipped with a 300-nit 100% sRGB panel, that is what goes back in.
What the repair includes
- Panel matched by manufacturer part number
- Hinge and mount inspection — the usual cause of a second cracked screen
- Bezel, webcam and microphone cable refit and test
- Dead-pixel and uniformity check before the machine is boxed
Bring it in if you see
- Cracked or spidered glass
- Ink-blot or spreading dark patch
- Vertical or horizontal lines
- Backlight dead but image visible under torchlight
- Flickering at certain angles
- From
- £199
- Turnaround
- 3–5 working days
- Warranty
- 12 months
Motherboard & board-level repair
Most shops replace boards because replacing boards is all they can do. It needs no microscope, no schematics and no soldering skill — and it turns a £15 component failure into a £600 invoice, or a write-off when the board is discontinued.
We work at component level. The board goes on a bench supply, we read the current draw, compare rails against the schematic and boardview, and find the part that actually failed. Usually it is a capacitor, a MOSFET, a fuse, a charging IC or an embedded controller. Occasionally it is a BGA chip, and then it is reballed under a controlled thermal profile.
What the repair includes
- Short-circuit and rail-voltage tracing against board schematics
- Microsoldering under a stereo microscope, ESD-safe bench
- BGA reballing with a profiled hot-air rework station
- Six-hour minimum burn-in with thermal imaging under load
Bring it in if you see
- No power at all
- Charge LED dead with a known-good charger
- Powers on, no display, no POST
- Shuts down under load
- Burning smell or visible corrosion
- From
- £69
- Turnaround
- 24–48 hours
- Warranty
- 12 months
Battery, charging port & power faults
Three different faults get described as "the battery has gone": a genuinely worn cell, a charging circuit that no longer negotiates with the adapter, and a DC jack or USB-C port whose solder joints have fractured from being knocked. Only the first is fixed by a new battery.
We read the cycle count and design-versus-full capacity first, then test the charging rail. If the cells are fine and the board is not charging, a new battery would have been £90 wasted.
What the repair includes
- Battery health report: cycle count, design capacity, current full charge
- Swollen cell removal, safe transport and licensed disposal
- DC jack and USB-C port re-soldering, or full port replacement
- Charging IC, MOSFET and sense-resistor replacement
Bring it in if you see
- Runs only on mains
- Trackpad or base bowing outwards
- Charger has to be held at an angle
- Plugged in, not charging
- Drops from 40% to zero instantly
- From
- £79
- Turnaround
- Same day
- Warranty
- 12 months
SSD, RAM & performance upgrades
The single best value job on this price list. A five-year-old business laptop with a mechanical drive is not slow because the processor is old — it is slow because it is waiting on a disk that manages about 100 random reads a second where an NVMe drive manages hundreds of thousands.
We clone the existing installation sector by sector, so you keep your applications, licences, settings and files exactly as they were. Nothing to reinstall, nothing to re-activate.
What the repair includes
- Full sector-level clone — no reinstall, no lost licences
- NVMe, M.2 SATA and 2.5" SATA options with a five-year drive warranty
- Memory upgrade where the machine has sockets (we check first, honestly)
- Thermal service included free with any upgrade
Bring it in if you see
- Ninety seconds to the desktop
- Beachballs or spinners on simple tasks
- Drive constantly at 100% in Task Manager
- Out of space
- Clicking or grinding from the chassis
- From
- £149
- Turnaround
- 2–4 working days
- Warranty
- 12 months
Liquid damage restoration
Corrosion is an electrochemical process and it does not stop when the laptop feels dry. Sugar and salt in the liquid keep pulling moisture out of the air and keep eating copper traces for weeks. This is why rice does nothing useful and why the machine that arrives in a day does far better than the one that arrives in a month.
If it has just happened: hold the power button until it shuts off, do not plug it in, do not try to charge it, keep it inverted and open, and get it to a bench. Around seven in ten spills that reach us inside 72 hours are fully recovered.
What the repair includes
- Full teardown within hours of arrival
- Ultrasonic cleaning of the board in a controlled bath
- Corroded component identification and replacement
- Honest go / no-go verdict inside 24 hours, before you commit
Bring it in if you see
- Any spill, however small
- Keys sticking or repeating after a spill
- Random shutdowns days after a spill
- Trackpad behaving on its own
- Green or white crust on connectors
- From
- £199
- Turnaround
- 3–10 working days
- Warranty
- 12 months
Data recovery
The first rule of data recovery is that nothing we do can be allowed to make the original worse. So we image first. A sector-level copy is taken to clean media, and every recovery attempt happens on the copy — never on your drive.
Logical failures (deleted partitions, corrupted file systems, ransomware) are usually recovered in days. Physical failures — a failed SSD controller, degraded NAND, a head crash on a mechanical drive — need donor parts and are quoted individually after assessment.
What the repair includes
- Sector-level image taken before any recovery attempt
- Logical recovery: deleted, formatted, corrupted, ransomware-encrypted
- Physical recovery: controller transplant, NAND work, head assembly
- Encrypted volumes handled under a signed NDA
Bring it in if you see
- Drive missing from BIOS
- Clicking or beeping drive
- Files present but unreadable
- Accidental format or deletion
- Ransomware note on the desktop
- From
- £69
- Turnaround
- Same day
- Warranty
- 12 months
Overheating & thermal service
Thermal paste is a consumable. It dries out in three to four years, the heatsink fins mat with dust and hair, and the processor starts pulling its own clock speed down to stay under its temperature limit. You feel that as a machine that is fine for ten minutes and useless thereafter.
This is cheap to fix and expensive to ignore: sustained high temperatures shorten the life of the battery, the board and the fan bearings.
What the repair includes
- Full strip, heatsink fin clean and fan replacement where bearings are worn
- Premium thermal compound and correctly specified thermal pads
- Before-and-after thermal report under a sustained load test
- Vent and intake clearance check
Bring it in if you see
- Fans at full speed on light tasks
- Palm rest too hot to touch
- Frame rates collapsing after ten minutes
- Sudden shutdowns under load
- Rattling or grinding fan noise
- From
- £69
- Turnaround
- 24–48 hours
- Warranty
- 12 months
Keyboard, trackpad & hinge repair
Hinge failures are the repair people leave too long. The mount tears out of the plastic, then every open and close levers it further, until the lid cracks the palm rest and shears the display cable. Caught early it is a rebuild. Caught late it is a chassis and a screen.
Keyboards and trackpads are more forgiving. A single sticking key is often a keycap and retainer clip; a whole deck of dead keys after a spill is a membrane; a trackpad that registers phantom touches is usually a ribbon cable or a ground fault rather than the trackpad itself.
What the repair includes
- Hinge mount rebuilding, re-bonding and reinforcement
- Single keycap, retainer clip or full keyboard deck replacement
- Trackpad, ribbon cable and palm rest assembly work
- Chassis and bottom-cover replacement where the frame is beyond rebuild
Bring it in if you see
- Lid stiff, loose or crunching
- Gap opening between screen and base
- Keys sticking, repeating or dead
- Trackpad clicking on its own
- Cracks radiating from the hinge corners
Brands we work on every week
Board-level work depends on having the schematics, the boardview files and the donor parts. These are the platforms our bench sees most often — but if your machine is not listed, ask. The diagnosis is free either way.
- Apple MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Intel and Apple Silicon
- Dell XPS, Latitude, Inspiron, Precision, Alienware
- HP Spectre, EliteBook, Envy, Pavilion, ProBook
- Lenovo ThinkPad, IdeaPad, Yoga, Legion
- ASUS ZenBook, VivoBook, ROG, TUF
- Acer Swift, Aspire, Predator, Nitro
- Microsoft Surface Laptop, Surface Pro, Surface Book
- MSI · Razer · Samsung Gaming and thin-and-light ranges
Not sure which of these your fault falls under? Our symptom checker maps what your laptop is doing to what it usually means, or read the laptop repair cost guide for the numbers behind each service.
Tell us what your laptop is doing. We will tell you what it needs.
No queue, no call centre, no "we will have to send it away". Describe the symptoms and a LaptopHaber.com engineer replies with the likely cause and a price bracket — usually within two working hours, always before you commit to anything.
- No fix, no fee Decline the quote and you pay nothing — we even return it free.
- 12-month warranty Parts and labour, on every repair we complete.
- 48 hours average Priority 24-hour lane available on most repairs.
- Walk-in or mail-in London workshop, plus free tracked UK collection.