Useful resources for repair

General

• The Art of Trouble Shooting gives insights into the principles that underpin diagnosis and repair.
• Battery University is a free educational website that offers both theoretical and practical battery information to engineers, educators, media, students and battery users alike, including advice on maximizing rechargeable battery life as well as safe charging and use.
• BigCliveDotCom has a YouTube channel in which he tears down and explains the working of numerous electrical and electronic devices.
• EEVblog is another highly instructive YouTube channel, perhaps a little more technical, often discussing unusual devices.

Disassembly and Repair

The quickest way to find disassembly information for a device is often to feed the device make and model into your favourite search engine, appended with "disassembly". You can also have a look at the article “how to search for repair solutions”. But the results will be of variable quality and usefulness. The following sites will often figure in the search results and may give some of the higher quality information.

• manualslib.com contains a large repository of manuals for various types of device.
• The Manual Library at the Internet Archive has archived over 2 million manuals of various sorts.
• academie.repaircafeparis.fr (French) provides detailed repair manuals with pictures provided for many appliances.
• Website selling spare parts for household appliances will sometimes provide instructions on how to replace a part and other useful information. Some examples of such websites are: www.espares.co.uk/advice (English), www.fiyo.co.uk/repair-advice and www.spareka.fr/comment-reparer ( French), www.fixpart.be (French, German, Dutch)
• iFixit makes it easy to fix things with online step-by-step repair guides, troubleshooting tips, and a thriving community of repair technicians who want to help.
• Fixit Club consists of simple instructions and tips on troubleshooting and repairing household things that break by best-selling “How Does it Work?” author Dan Ramsey.
• FixYa is building a crowdsourced database of help queries and personalised answers.
• Electronics Repair presents tips and guides by Jestine Yong (and his friends around the world) to repair load of electronics products.
• sci.electronics.repair FAQ is a comprehensive historical archive of tips and guides on repairing many kinds of consumer electronics.
• On the websites of Repair Together (FR) and Repair&Share (NL)  you will find repair manuals created for and by Repair Café volunteers. You will need some basic knowledge to start working with them. The manuals are mainly about small household appliances such as mixers, hoovers, sewing machines, irons, etc.
• Bad Caps Forum provides help for suspected bad electrolytic capacitors.
• Future proof: Tim’s laptop service manuals is a collection of professional, official documents published by the various laptop makers, either for their own technicians or for use by the general public.
• On www.insidemylaptop.com you will find a lot of interesting information about laptops.
• Reddit’s Computer Technicians is for people who are repair professionals or aspire to become one. “End users” are encouraged to use /r/techsupport

Software

• Awesome software running on old hardware is an online, collaborative list of projects that attempt to compile or install “recent” software on old hardware, thus extending the lifespan of these products.
• Oldversion.com is very useful when new software or their upgrades are too heavy or don’t work at all on an old pc (or implement new features you don’t like).