The Iggblog

Some of you may remember an earlier post about a laptop I had received from my grandmother a month or so ago. it was fine except for a faulty power connector in the back of the unit. Basically, it just refused to take a charge consistently and would fail at seemingly random times due to “wonky power related shit” (sorry for techspeak). the techs had told my poor grandmother that she would need a new motherboard, so she went out and got a new device long before consulting any non-leeches about the problem. upon hearing the symptoms I figured the issue could likely be fixed with some creative soldering. failing that, aggressive soldering. I mean, it’s a great laptop. plenty fast, 3d card, nice roomy HDD, wifi, etc… worth a little elbow greae before dubbing it a brick.

so I took a crack at fixing it yesterday. I used the “take shit off it till you’ve got nothing left but the parts you want” method. my god, I must have taken out around a hundred screws. this poor laptop was distributed evenly over the entire table I was working on. I had no idea they could fit so much crap in such a small space. Eventually with some wrestling and strong-arming I was able to crack the case… I might add I did this in such a way that I was convinced it would never go together again. I finally whittled it down to the motherboard. The issue was that the center pin in the power connector had somehow shed it’s solder. the peg was sitting in the board, but was not soldered, so the connection would break extremely easily as the power jack wiggled around. I tossed on a quick dab of solder and was done.

oddly enough, when I put everything back in it still worked! perfectly! no magic had escaped! and I only had 4 screws left over when it was all back together (spares, clearly). So with just a few hours of elbow grease and one wad of solder I have myself a nice new lappy to play with. whee.