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sillygoosegirlWell, I disassembled my laptop last night (with our awesome new screwdriver set--thanks Kay, you rock). The connection between the power plug reciever (or whatever that should be called), and the mother board seems to be broken. At least the slight bits of possible movement and the clicking noises, and the complete lack of ability for it to see power seem to suggest that. Anyway, I got it all disassembled hoping that it would be relatively trivial to re-solder it. No such luck unfortunately. There's metal casing stuff that seems to be attached to the mother board that is going to make reaching in there to do it next to impossible for starts... plus, soldering to the mother board is hardly something to be taken lightly. It was pretty cool to see how it came apart though.
It strikes me as a poor engineering job to have the power thingy soldered directly to the mother board though. The other moving parts (screen, keyboard, etc) are connected to wires which plug in to the mother board. That seems a lot smarter. The design on the power plug though, means that every time it gets plugged in, there is a force applied to the plug reciever which is perpendicular to the solder joint to the mother board, and every time the cord get moved about while plugged into the computer, you get little rocking forces (imagine the forces you apply to a loose tooth when you wiggle it). Sigh. For $300 I can get myself a new mother board, but I don't want to sink that much money into a machine that lacks internal wireless, USB 2.0, and only has a 20 GB or 30 GB hard drive... not to mention batteries that hardly hold a charge anymore. Anyhow, I'm going to be computerless until the wedding. At that point, I'll be able to bring the thing home and see if my dad thinks he can re-solder it for me. It's certainly beyond my skills, but not necessarily beyond his. And if it doesn't work... well, we haven't managed to save enough money for the down payment on a condo by the time our lease is up anyway.
It strikes me as a poor engineering job to have the power thingy soldered directly to the mother board though. The other moving parts (screen, keyboard, etc) are connected to wires which plug in to the mother board. That seems a lot smarter. The design on the power plug though, means that every time it gets plugged in, there is a force applied to the plug reciever which is perpendicular to the solder joint to the mother board, and every time the cord get moved about while plugged into the computer, you get little rocking forces (imagine the forces you apply to a loose tooth when you wiggle it). Sigh. For $300 I can get myself a new mother board, but I don't want to sink that much money into a machine that lacks internal wireless, USB 2.0, and only has a 20 GB or 30 GB hard drive... not to mention batteries that hardly hold a charge anymore. Anyhow, I'm going to be computerless until the wedding. At that point, I'll be able to bring the thing home and see if my dad thinks he can re-solder it for me. It's certainly beyond my skills, but not necessarily beyond his. And if it doesn't work... well, we haven't managed to save enough money for the down payment on a condo by the time our lease is up anyway.
