Laptop Repair
I have had a dell 600m laptop for about three years now. It sucks. Well I guess its a bit more complicated than that.
It worked perfectly for a year. About a week after the one year warranty expired, hardware started to fail. First was the wired ethernet port; it would randomly cause the machine to lockup until I disabled it in the bios. Next was the power button. When I would try to turn on the machine, the LEDs would flicker for a few seconds and then turn off. The only way to get the machine to turn on was to remove the battery and hit it in a specific place. Most recently, the power connector has become flaky. A loose connection somewhere that required cable jiggling. Annoying but I could work around these failures.
Until last week. I jiggled and jiggled but to no avail. My laptop would not charge. For most, this would have probably been a good time to purchase a new machine. But I'm cheap and there aren't any machines out there right now that I like. So my only real option was laptop surgery.
Disclaimer: Don't try this unless you are ok with completely ruining your hardware and/or electrocuting yourself.
Fortunately dell has really good repair manuals available online. So with the help of the manual, I took my laptop apart. To get to the power connector, I had to take it all apart.
With the machine apart, it was clear that the power connector had physically detached from the motherboard. Soldering would have been difficult if not impossible based on power connector was located. But it looked like I could build a shim to hold the connector in place.
Now it was just a question of what to use for this shim. I don't have a lot of materials in my apartment for this sort of thing (strange, I know). But with a little bit of scrounging I found a fan who's blades were about the right size. This very fan betrayed me only a few weeks earlier so I had no problem breaking off a few blades.
And I had power again.
This was only a short term fix. I don't think my laptop will last past January. Even still, its nice to get a few more months out of it.