Hi all. Someone asked me to check out their laptop because it stopped working and I've not encountered this issue before. With the battery in and it plugged in, the battery charging light is on and turns green when the battery is fully charged, however pressing the power button does nothing. If I take the battery out and unplug it, then hold the power button for a few seconds (I guess discharging whatever power is left in it), and then plug it back in to AC or reattach the battery, the power light comes on and fans start up for about a second (without me touching the power button) and then nothing again. Any ideas? Help is much appreciated.
board fault, unless you have the equipment to test the components on the board, it's probably not worth you looking any further.
What kind of equipment would be needed to test for that? Something beyond the standard multimeter? It would be nice to resurrect this old thing for them.
you could try with a multimeter, but that really is only good enough to test voltages around the board, what you really need are component testers that are capable of testing the chips as well as testing individual capacitors, resisters etc. you could try the hot air gun trick, it helps some people.
Sounds like a similar problem to what I'm having with mine. A laptop repair friend of mine diagnosed mine as a fault with the bit of circuitry that controls where power is coming from, the PSU or the battery, and whether the battery is being charged. Think of it as the laptop equivalent of a car's alternator. If it's a more expensive laptop then you may be lucky. A lot of laptop manufactures started including these as modular parts just after the DC input, but before the motherboard. It will just be a simple matter of sourcing and replacing it. If you are not so lucky, and I suspect this may be the case given that my i7 ASUS laptop doesn't have it as a modular part, then the best bit of advice I received was from this forum; because this a common and known fault with most laptops (as you can see from the move to modular parts) the Sales of Goods Act of 1979 states that a good should be fit for purpose for 6 years. All you have to do is get an engineers report detailing the fault and the seller should do something about it. (See Blogins' great post here for more details) If it's older than 6 years, then the heatgun seems to be your friend! Good luck!!
Well I'm thinking it's almost 6 years old, a sticker I can see inside shows 2007/5/17, and it looks like it's been a rough 6. I already replaced the dead hard drive in it a while back. Also we're in the states so I don't know if the SOG act is applicable anyway. It's a cheap Acer with Vista on it, so I doubt it has anything modular. I haven't fully taken it apart yet, probably Thursday when I'm off work I will and check it out further. Tell me more of this heat trick if you please
Update: I took it apart and there was corrosion around the power connector on the circuit board top and bottom, I've cleaned it but still it won't stay powered on past about 2 seconds :| Other than the corrosion nothing's jumping out at me, besides how dirty it is and how much crap was inside...
