Super User’s Top Question of the Week [9 Jan – 16 Jan]

This week featured Top Question comes from Pekka:

Fixing Bent Pins on the CPU

Intel and AMD have started to utlilize the new “pinless” CPU technology so this issue shouldn’t be a problem for too much longer.  But if you’re like me, you still have an old p4 system lying around and it’s a pain when you realize that you’ve bent a pin on a processor.   So what do you do when you’ve found that you’ve bent one or a few of the processor pins?  Well first take a deep breath and realize that at least you don’t have it as bad as HowToGeek had it when he, on accident, dropped and bent around 50 processors.

If you’ve got a massive amount of pins that are bent then using a credit card or a small thin pocket knife is the best option for getting them all back into a general straightness.  You can follow this guide on how to do that.

If you however have only a few pins to move back or want just can’t seem to get it right with the credit card then this answer from evesirim is best… A Mechanical Pencil!

It’s quite simple really:

1. Take the processor chip and carefully hold or place it on the table:
2. Removing the graphite from the pencil, take the mechanical pencil and slip the nosil over the bent pins:
3. Then bend right back!

There you have it! A fixed CPU chip.