“This laptop needs a new power connector soldered to the motherboard. Take it apart and see what you can do.”
“Okay.”
About a zillion tiny screws in four sizes and two lengths later, pieces of laptop are scattered across the workbench. I have a motherboard. And no soldering skills. My boss gets out his gear. A while later, I’m able to put it back together.
I have one extra screw. Hmm.
Aaaaand, I forgot to put thermal paste on the heatsink. The laptop works for a while and abruptly turns off. System monitor indicates the cpu is too hot.
Disassembly is quicker the second time, and I don’t have to totally break it down - just lift the keyboard, the fan assembly, the heatsink, and then clean with solvent, apply paste, carefully reseat heatsink… eight dinky screws, two not-dinky screws, a pop and a crack later, it’s all back together.
Still overheats and shuts off.
I make a boot floppy off a downloaded bios update, to see if the motherboard is giving the fan wonky instructions that might be fixed with the update.
Floppy drive won’t work.
I make a floppy-emulating boot cd off the bench system (the one with all the nifty software, like Nero). I boot to the cd.
The bios update program says I don’t have the adapter plugged in. Which is true - I’m using a universal adapter, as we discovered the one that went with the laptop was defective. I switch adapters and boot again. This time the bios update goes smoothly from the cd.
Still overheats. Still shuts off.
I left it that way. If you ask me, when the system won’t boot with the battery in, has a burnt out adapter, and randomly shuts off? Mama needs a new laptop. If it were only the battery and the adapter, well, those aren’t cheap but they’re cheaper than a new laptop. The motherboard on top of those things, however, is very likely to cost more than the system’s worth at this point. But it’s up to the boss to do something with it.
And in the second reassembly, I had… a different screw left over. Oy.
No comments
Comments feed for this article