From cracked screens and swollen batteries to the board-level microsoldering most high-street shops turn away — our 14 certified engineers have completed 38,000+ repairs since 2014. Free diagnosis, one fixed written price, and your data never leaves the workshop.
Prefer to talk it through? Call 020 7946 0958 and speak to an engineer, not a call centre.
LaptopHaber.com started in 2014 as a single bench and a stereo microscope, because too many people were being told a £40 fault was a £600 motherboard. Today we are 14 certified engineers, 38,000+ repairs later — and a meaningful share of our work still arrives from other shops who do not solder.
We own the microscopes, the hot-air rework stations and the board schematics — so we can replace a failed 3p capacitor instead of selling you a £600 motherboard.
Every quote covers parts, labour and VAT before we start. If the job turns out to be simpler than expected, the invoice goes down, never up.
Drives are imaged before board work, stored in a locked cabinet, and logged in and out. We work to GDPR obligations as a data processor, in writing.
Eight benches, one standard. Whether it is a twenty-minute keycap job or a fortnight of board-level detective work, the same diagnosis, the same fixed quote and the same 12-month warranty apply.
Cracked glass, spreading ink blots, vertical lines, a backlight that never wakes. We match the exact panel — resolution, refresh rate, touch layer and connector — rather than fitting the cheapest thing that fits the lid.
When a shop tells you "the motherboard has gone" they usually mean one component on it has. We work at component level under a microscope, replacing the failed part instead of billing you for a whole board.
A laptop that only runs on mains, a charger that has to be wiggled, or a swollen battery pushing the trackpad up. Each has a different cause, and only one of them is actually the battery.
The cheapest way to make a five-year-old laptop feel new is almost never a new laptop. Moving from a mechanical drive to NVMe routinely cuts boot times from ninety seconds to under twelve.
Corrosion does not stop when the laptop dries — it keeps eating traces for weeks. Bring a spilled machine in fast and the odds are good; leave it in a bag of rice for a fortnight and they are not.
Dropped drive, failed SSD controller, ransomware, a deleted dissertation. We take a sector-level image first and work only on the copy, so nothing we do can make the original worse.
Fans at full tilt, a palm rest you cannot touch, frame rates that collapse after ten minutes. Thermal paste hardens and dust mats the heatsink fins — both are cheap to put right and expensive to ignore.
Sticking keys, a trackpad that ghosts, a hinge that has cracked the palm rest open. Hinge failures in particular get worse fast, because every open and close levers the mount further out of the chassis.
Not sure which one you need? That is exactly what the free diagnosis is for — describe the symptoms and we will tell you which bench your laptop belongs on.
Explore all repair services
Price ranges, not price traps. The figures below are the genuine spread we invoice, including parts, labour and VAT. Your quote lands somewhere inside them — never above.
Most laptop faults present as one of eight symptoms — and most of them are cheaper than the internet will tell you. Find yours below, then send us the details for a firm figure.
| Symptom | What it usually is | Our repair | Typical price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Will not power on at all | Usually a blown fuse, shorted capacitor or failed charging IC — very rarely a dead board | Rail tracing on a bench DC supply, component replacement | £99 – £249 |
| Powers on, screen stays black | Failed backlight circuit, loose or chafed display cable, or a dead GPU solder joint | External display test, cable or panel swap, GPU reflow / reball | £89 – £279 |
| Runs hot, fans roar, then shuts down | Thermal paste has dried out and the heatsink fins are matted with dust | Full strip, fin clean, fan replacement, premium re-paste | £69 – £119 |
| Battery drains in minutes or will not charge | Cell degradation past 500 cycles, or a failed charging circuit on the board | Battery health report, then cell or charging-IC replacement | £69 – £159 |
| Trackpad rising, chassis bowing | Swollen lithium-ion battery — a genuine fire risk, stop using the machine | Immediate safe removal, disposal, replacement cell | £89 – £179 |
| Everything is slow, especially start-up | Mechanical hard drive, full or failing SSD, or a thermally throttled CPU | SMART check, NVMe migration with full clone, thermal service | £79 – £159 |
| Random blue screens or freezes | Failing RAM, a dying drive, or a driver conflict — three very different bills | MemTest86 overnight, SMART analysis, clean driver stack | £49 – £169 |
| Lid cracking away from the base | Hinge mount has torn out of the plastic; every open and close makes it worse | Hinge mount rebuild and re-bond, or chassis replacement | £89 – £199 |
Most people put off a repair because they are afraid of an open-ended bill. The LaptopHaber process removes that risk entirely: you know the fault, the price and the timescale before any tool touches your laptop.
Tell us what the machine actually does — three beeps, a black screen that still lights the keyboard, a hinge that crunches. Our triage form turns plain English into an engineer-ready fault report before you have paid a penny.
Your laptop goes on the bench. We measure rail voltages with a DC power supply, read board schematics, check the SMART data on the drive and thermal-image the board under load — so the quote reflects the real fault, not a guess.
You get one written price covering parts and labour, the honest repair-versus-replace verdict, and photos of what we found. Decline it and you pay nothing — no fix, no fee, and we return the machine free of charge.
Approved repairs are completed by a named engineer, then stress-tested for a minimum of four hours before they leave. Your data stays on your drive, and the work is covered for 12 months, parts and labour.
Sending a machine from outside London? Our free tracked mail-in service uses the same bench, the same engineers and the same warranty — see transparent pricing for what each repair class costs.
Not showreel photography — three ordinary weeks in the workshop, including what the previous shop had quoted and what the machine actually needed.
Board-level £129 Final invoice vs £640 quoted elsewhere Dell XPS 15 9500
Data recovery 100% Of the working directory recovered Lenovo ThinkPad T14
Upgrade 11 sec Average boot time, down from 94 seconds HP EliteBook 840 G5 ×14
Every repair leaves with a written record of what was replaced and why. Read more worked examples in our repair guides, or send us your symptoms and we will tell you which of these your laptop most resembles.
No "from £19" bait, no diagnostic fee that quietly reappears on the invoice. These are the three ways we work, and the price you are quoted after diagnosis is the price you pay.
£29 one-off
For when you do not yet know what is wrong — and you want an honest answer before you spend anything.
from £89 parts & labour
The everyday repairs: cracked screens, dead batteries, snapped hinges, failing drives, loose charging ports.
from £199 per board
Component-level work most high-street shops refuse: liquid damage, dead boards, no-power faults, lost data.
Prices shown are typical starting points including VAT, and vary with the model and the part. A 2019 Dell Inspiron screen is not a 2024 MacBook Pro screen. You always receive one fixed, written quote first — see the full price list by fault and brand, or read how we reach a figure in our laptop repair cost guide.
We ask every customer the same question afterwards: would you have known what was actually wrong without us telling you? These are three of the answers.
Two other shops quoted me for a whole new motherboard on a nine-month-old XPS. LaptopHaber.com found a shorted capacitor, replaced it, and charged me a fifth of the cheapest other quote. They sent photos of the board before and after.
I spilled most of a flat white into a MacBook Air the night before a deadline. They took it at 9am, called me by lunchtime with an honest go/no-go, and had it back to me working on the Thursday. The data was all there.
We run fourteen laptops across two sites and they handle all of them. What I actually value is being told when not to repair something — they have talked us out of spending money twice now.
These are the nine questions our bench is asked most often. The answers are the same ones we give on the phone — including the times we tell people not to spend the money.
Still not sure what is wrong?
Describe the symptoms and an engineer at LaptopHaber will come back with a likely cause and a price bracket, usually within two working hours.
Ask an engineerMost jobs land between £69 and £249 including parts, labour and VAT. A battery, fan or keyboard is typically £69–£129. A screen runs £109–£279, because a 1366×768 TN panel and a 4K OLED touch assembly are not remotely the same part. Board-level microsoldering starts at £199.
Diagnosis is a flat £29, credited in full against any repair you approve — so an accurate answer costs you nothing if you go ahead. Full breakdown on our pricing page.
Our working rule is the 50% test: if the repair costs more than half what the same machine sells for used, and it is past five years old, replacement usually wins on maths alone.
That flips quickly, though. A £180 screen on a £1,400 machine with soldered RAM and a good chassis is an easy yes. So is any repair that saves data you have not backed up. We will tell you when the honest answer is "do not spend it" — and where the machine can be responsibly repaired or recycled instead.
The workshop average is 48 hours from approval. Anything on the shelf — batteries, fans, common screens, SSDs, keyboards — is frequently finished the same day.
Board-level microsoldering takes 3–5 working days because each stage is tested before the next. Data recovery runs 3–10 days depending on whether the fault is logical or physical. A priority 24-hour lane is available on most repair classes.
No. Screen, battery, keyboard, hinge and fan repairs never touch your storage. Before any board-level work or drive replacement we take a full sector-level image of the disk, so there is always a copy that predates anything we do.
Drives are held in a locked cabinet, access is logged, and we work to GDPR requirements as a data processor. We still recommend your own backup first — Windows Backup or Time Machine takes minutes.
Usually, yes — "no power" is one of the most repairable faults we see, and one of the most over-diagnosed. It is rarely a dead motherboard; it is far more often a blown fuse, a shorted capacitor, a failed charging IC, a dead embedded controller or a single collapsed power rail.
We put the board on a bench DC supply and watch the current draw, then trace the rails against the board schematic. That tells us which component failed, and a component is a fraction of the price of a board.
Yes, and speed is everything. Corrosion continues long after the laptop feels dry, so the machine that arrives in 24 hours has a far better outlook than the one that spent three weeks in a bag of rice — which does nothing useful.
Do this instead: hold the power button until it shuts off, do not plug it in, do not try to charge it, keep it upside down and open, and get it to a bench. Roughly seven in ten spills we see within 72 hours are fully recovered.
Not wholesale, no. In the UK your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 sit with the retailer and cannot be signed away. A manufacturer's voluntary guarantee can exclude damage caused by third-party work, but it cannot be cancelled simply because someone else opened the machine.
In the US the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act makes most "warranty void if removed" stickers unenforceable. That said: if your fault is still covered by the maker, use that first — we will say so and charge you nothing.
Very often, and it is the best-value job on the price list. Swapping a mechanical hard drive for an NVMe SSD routinely takes boot time from ninety seconds to under twelve, and it is the single change most people actually feel.
Add memory where the sockets allow it, clear the heatsink so the CPU stops thermal-throttling, and a 2019 machine becomes genuinely pleasant again for around £79–£150. Check what your model accepts with Crucial's compatibility tool, or ask us.
Yes. Our mail-in service covers the whole of the UK, is fully tracked and insured in both directions, and is free on approved repairs. You book online, we email a prepaid label and packing instructions, and you get the same engineers and the same 12-month warranty as a walk-in.
You will receive photographs of the fault before you approve anything. Start a mail-in repair.
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.
