I watched with horror this morning, again, as the battery on my laptop slowly drained from 96% to 0% without me ever finding an angle that I could connect the charger to it at that would actually charge it. That was extremely frustrating. The end result of this is that I looked up (on my phone) where I might be able to possibly get a laptop battery change here in Guangzhou, even if it wasn’t an “authorized” service centre, since the laptop was out of warranty anyway and I needed it for work. Google suggested a place called Tianhe Computer Town, so away I went.

Well, technically. Despite its name, Tianhe Computer Town is merely one building in a row of buildings with a bunch of computer shops in it, but I’m not sure if there’s a name for the entire neighbourhood of shops and buildings there. I see names online like Guangzhou Computer Street, Tianhe Gangding Computer Markets, and variations on the above, but Tianhe Computer Town was (sort of) the name of the main building I visited anyway, and sounds the coolest, so I am sticking with that.

The Gangding name was because the nearest station was Gangding Station, and that was probably the name of the neighbourhood of the general area as well, though the district itself was Tianhe. I arrived at Gangding Station and left the immediate vicinity of the station gates, ending up in an underground mall area that was already very tech-centric.

I wasn’t here for this particular branded area though, so I stepped up and out of whatever mall area that was, and walked along the street itself toward my goal. I never did cross the street to the other side of the road, but I definitely took some pictures of that while I went along.

Even those bridges look like some weird component on a motherboard or something. I finally reached Tianhe Computer Town, where I found out that despite that online name that it’s most well-known by, the sign in front of the building actually says Galaxy Computer Plaza.

Okay then. Tianhe means Milky Way, and that last word has multiple meanings, so its technically correct, but I like it when people can’t agree on a name for a place, and when the original place has its actual name overridden by the Internet. Except when it affects my blog. I’m sticking with Tianhe Computer Town.

I went into the building and dodged a few pushy salespeople from branded stores trying to sell me cellphones and laptops. My laptop is a Gigabyte Aorus, and almost immediately, I found what I was looking for, a Gigabyte stall. Hoorah!

I spoke to them and they were puzzled at first, shaking their head and saying that they didn’t do laptop repairs. After that, when I persisted and asked if they knew anyone that could, the guy did some clacking on his laptop and said that they could get a battery in for me and replace it by tomorrow if I wanted to leave the laptop with them overnight, and that it would cost something like 407 RMB, or nearly $80 CAD. I consulted with Kel, who had also been asking her group chats and IT staff at school if anyone had any recommendations on what to do with a busted laptop (they didn’t), and we agreed that this sounded extremely sketchy. I certainly wasn’t going to leave my laptop there overnight. So I said I’d think about it, and moved along, never intending to return.

Not far from there, I went to this random repair store, which at least had the English words for laptop repair, battery charger, and more on their sign, although they didn’t really looked like they stored spare batteries. They at least had some cute Linlee ducks though. (Other stores in here did too, this is genius free advertising by the lemon tea company.)

The proprietor here, who I believe was named Mr Fang when I asked him his name, accurately guessed that I was from Singapore by the way I spoke Chinese, he’s the third person to somehow guess this about me on my trip even though I haven’t lived in Singapore in decades. The first two were people in Taiwan, a random convenience store cashier when I was paying for a drink, as well as the woman in Songjiang Market that I bought a couple of cheap clothes from. There was someone else in Guangzhou a few days earlier that had guessed that I was from Taiwan — unfortunately they were wrong so I didn’t buy anything from them. He said he had never left China before but that, like the other people who had correctly identified my “accent” (which I had no idea existed in Chinese too), they had had Singaporean visitors and customers stop by before.

I showed him my laptop and told him about my woes and my need to find a replacement battery, since I had replaced basically everything else. He had never seen a Gigabyte Aorus laptop before, but he plugged some sort of voltmeter thing into the laptop, and declared that the battery itself was fine and it was actually the connection where the power brick plugs into the laptop that was damaged. Oho. He said he could fix it (since laptops were all somewhat similar anyway) but it would cost several hundred yuan and he would need to open up everything. But he would do it on the spot. That sounded good, if that was going to be the actual fix, since I was never going to be able to fix something like that myself. So I gave him permission to open it up for surgery.

Over the next hour, I watched him unscrew and pick apart every internal organ in my hapless laptop.

He had a whole set of tools, and like a surgeon with a scalpel in both hands, he used magnetic screwdrivers to remove all the screws, which he stored in a box, and then some sort of tool to test the conductivity or something of various internal components. I don’t know exactly what tool that was or what was done there. He then used a roll of metallic thread and a soldering tool, and melted the thread onto where the power connection came in to the laptop, which I guess restored the connection again.

Does it work? We tested it afterwards and it seemed to work! He’s right, the original battery charged just fine (even though I’m sure it’s a little degraded over time) once the charging port was “fixed”. I could twist and turn the power cable and the battery would not disconnect and reconnect over and over again or “fake charge”, where the light came on but the laptop still lost power. Even with the power brick that I had brought along (oh so heavy). We also tested all the ports and those still seemed to work afterwards, so that was nice.

This did cost 650 RMB, which turned out to be about 670 RMB after a processing fee that Wechat Pay charged, because apparently they do that for transactions over a certain amount. That was about $130 CAD. It also saved me a new battery though, which would have been the wrong diagnosis after all and would have been 2/3 of that cost itself, plus I needed the laptop to do work, so as long as the fix lasts for some time, I think it was worth it. I even gave him a nice Edmonton postcard afterwards in thanks and made off with my laptop. So his specific shop was stall #139 in Tianhe Computer Town, and assuming the fix holds, I definitely recommend them (without knowing if the service was actually overpriced or not) and even Kel said she’d go seek him out if her laptop ever runs into trouble.

But if my laptop dies again before I return home and I suddenly go dark, then you know who to blame.

After this, I went for lunch in a store across the street. Not across the main road to the side that I never went to, just across a side street. I had Lanzhou Cold Noodles (28 yuan) and a side of rice (extra 3 yuan):

It wasn’t all that good, I’ve never found cold noodles that I really like, I think, but it doesn’t and didn’t hurt to try. In fact, this delivery guy came in for lunch and asked me what my dish was and how much it cost before he sat down at his table. So I proudly told him.

I noticed that he ended up ordering something else.

After lunch, I went to look around some of the other buildings on this side of the street. I went back to Tianhe Computer Town and walked around, and took more pictures. Most will get galleried here.