Switch Jack
Switch Jack
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One of my ex-flatmates is not so computer savvy and found me with her problem the other day. Her laptop wasn't charging unless she held the charger's connector firmly in place and she was concerned if this quick switching was killing the motherboard in her laptop.
It was a rather old Fujitsu-Siemens A1650G notebook with a 3300+ Sempron processor and 512MB RAM, and the battery held on for about 40 minutes fully charged. She also had some weird shut down problems which she thought to be related with either the charger or the battery. I told her to look around and see how much it costs to fix the DC jack, because I was sure the problem was related to it.
She even told me that her roomate tripped in the cord so that gave me some extra confidence in my opinion. She took the laptop and asked a few computer repair shops along the road here in London and the lowest price they told her was 70 pounds(more than a hundred dollars), which I found to be ridiculously high for the complexity of the problem.
We headed to town and bough tin and a soldering iron with a pointed tip. We also got a screwdriver set so that I could disassemble the thing. When I took the laptop apart at first it took me three hours because I didn't want to break any of the small plastic parts that hold these cheap notebooks together.
I removed about twenty screws and put them into a bowl but it didn't want to come apart so I watched a few videos on YouTube about it and found one where a Romanian guy shows to take these things apart. He took another approach, which worked just fine for me as well. I thought I had to be careful when disassembling a notebook but I forgot that I also had to be firm. Took a big screwdriver and popped the black panel in front of the screen taking care of the small plastic pieces but applying enough force.
When it was off I had access to the keyboard, which pops out just fine if you pus the left and right edges to the middle while pushing the whole thing towards the screen. From that point the disassembly was straight ahead and about half an hour later I could see the root of the problem. Her flatmate pulled the charger so hard when she tripped that two of the five legs were completely missing, they totally fell off, and one leg, the one in which the middle pin ended was one of them.
It was grim so we ordered a replacement connector for about 5 pounds plus two for shipping. While the one I ordered looked exactly like the one in the notebook it turned out to be the exact mirror image of it. First I thought it won't fit but looking at where the legs are connected inside the connector I figured I'll get away with putting it in from the other way around into the motherboard.
I removed the old broken one in about two hours. The legs that were still in the soldering point took me the most time to remove as the soldering iron didn't really work the way I expected it will. It taught me that a cheap soldering iron is not always the best possible solution.
Installing the DC connector went quite easily and with the routine I had from disassembling the laptop two times before I put it together in twenty minutes to see if it charges. It did, however the pin was a bit firm because it was bigger than the original. The charger fits it well, though so it's all well.
I also found that the shutdown problems were caused by inadequate thermal greasing and a bend in the heatsink. Using an alcoholic cloth I cleaned the surfaces, added the grease and using two folded pieces of paper under two of the springs I managed to offset the bend. Note that laptops really have IHS on the core, so you have to be really careful while taking the cooler off or putting it back on to avoid chipping it.
The whole process with the screwdriver set, soldering iron, new connector took me about 20 pounds and five hours, and the next time I'll have to do it it will cost only about 7 pounds.
Interested in Mobile Computing and Notebooks?
Read on for more information about Fixing Broken Laptop Connectors.
