How e-scrap is processed - Page 3

To add a little to this great conversation, Last year my wife's and my laptops both had critical failures. Mine was an HP and hers was an Acer (both were around 3 years old). I found a guy that can troubleshoot laptops down to the component. He will tear them apart and troubleshoot. He does not do all of it, but outsources to a motherboard guy. Wifeys was a fault due to cigartte smoke burning up 2 very tiny chips that were cost inneffective to replace (I am more careful of my smoke around my computer). I never had him tear apart my HP, by in my conversation with him, there had been a good bit of motherboards in HPs coming from Japan that had cold solder joints. He had a guy that bought a resolder tank? whatever you would call it. I am assuming a wave solder tank of some sort, but the big thing was that he had a LOT of boards that came from Japan form that time period that needed a "solder bath". Just sharing.

Back when I used to do CB radio repair, my store was in a truckstop so 80-90% of my customers were truck drivers. The over the road radios would be guaranteed to have bad solder joints once or twice in their lifetime. The trucks would literally shake the radio to pieces. It makes sense to me that the more you carry your laptop around/ throw it in the car seat/ bounce it off the couch/ etc. the better chance is your going to have a bad solder joint in the board.
Sometimes it is just a matter of too much heat expanding the board and creating a cold solder joint, you let it cool down and it take off working again. This is just from experience in other electronics.