Help needed: Best motherboard repair service for Thinkpads?

Well, my long-time loyal R50p had an issue the other day. The kind that involves clouds of grey smoke and burn marks on the motherboard. Seems to be component failure, something related to the power system, since it had been refusing to charge the battery earlier that day--I'd chalked it up to the age and poor condition of the battery, and hadn't thought much of it. Now though it's nonfunctional, with a burned area near the DC jack, and I'm trying to figure out if it's practical to try and make it operational again, or if I need to sell it for parts. I'd like to know what recommendations people have for the best motherboard repair place to send it to. A small up-front fee isn't a problem, so long as it's not outrageous, and they'll send the thing back if I don't like their estimate. It's not been under IBM warranty for six months, of course, or I would be availing myself of their service again.

 

Depending on how hard it would be to fix (smoke is never a good sign), it may be better to simply sink the cost of a repair into a new notebook. The R50 is a big old and you may like some of the new technology available today. If you are dead-set on keeping the R50, I would call IBM and see if they'll fix it and how much they'll charge. If there was some burning you may need a new planar board; that can get expensive.

 

Laptop boards are highly specialized and therefore very expensive. A used one off eBay is usually the cheapest route.

 

I've already pretty much accepted the neccessity of that, but I was rather hoping that it might be possible to resurrect the R50p and keep it in reserve as a backup. My laptop is essential to me, and it's quite unpleasant right now running on an antique Dell.

The burns seem to be superficial, other than the damage to whatever component it was that overheated and self-destructed. I've had success in the past with component-level replacement where a crucial bit burnt itself up, and I was hoping that, while I didn't have the parts (or time) myself, one of the advertised component-replacement services would be up to the task.