HELF

[ewt]

Purr, my laptop, is sick. It was fine last night, but this morning it won't power on, or even give me a little light to tell me it is plugged in.

The light on the power supply does come on.

When I tilt the computer there is a noise like a screw loose in there, but that may have been there before without my particularly noticing.

Possible causes of this problem:
-we had a brief power surge and fritzed the power supply, so the light comes on but it isn't working right
-the power supply cord or connector has worn out
-the power connector on the computer has worn out
-something Vitally Important has come unscrewed
-the fan died, and something melted
-we had a brief power surge the power supply couldn't deal with, and something melted
-something else I do not understand
-ghosties are in there
-the lions got out of the battery and made a mess
-lynnyn decided to have a walk around in there for her birthday yesterday, and accidentally stepped on something.

The good news is that I still have the desktop computer, and thanks to the extra-long ethernet cord sci gave me, I can actually use it on t'intarweb.

The bad news is that the laptop is old, not a standard make (Sager, which I'd never heard of before), I have no spares, I don't even have a multimeter to tell whether the power supply is working right, and I don't really know what the next step is in fixing it, beyond asking you lot for help. shevek doesn't think he can do with it (see no spares, no tools).

The other bad news is that the aging CRT on the desktop makes my eyes and my brain hurt something fierce. I might see whether I can hook the deaded laptop up as a screen, instead...

Comments

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, my laptop is similarly on its last legs, this probably won't be a consolation, but I've ended up performing soldering iron surgery on the motherboard more than once. The power has always been a problem for me on every laptop I've owned. On this one (the one I'm typing this on at the moment), the power-supply socket which is soldered onto the motherboard gets all sorts of stress applied to it by repeated plugging and unplugging, and eventually went dry. The solution to this at first is to stick something underneath the plug so that it's stuck at an angle, but eventually this just needs surgery with a soldering iron. The other problem I get is that the power supply brick has a moulded wire and moulded plug on the end. In one power supply for this laptop, there's a short in one of the bits of wire, and so it won't stay on unless it's at the right angle - unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure what this is. On the other brick, there is a piece of bare wire underneath the power-brick end of the strain relief, if you get that end at the wrong angle, then no current flows. Luckily that one is the more soluble of the two, and there's a piece of masking tape around that brick to hold the wire in the right position... On the powerbook that my parents used to have (System 7 and Mac OS 8, so well pre OS X), the power supply plug was a female axial plug, so you had a pin on the laptop. The connector for the positive supply, inside the hole in the plug, was a single piece of wire, bent around. After a while, this stopped making contact with the pin - so you had to get a needle in there and pull it back out from the wall of the plug.

All fun. Whatever yours turns out to be, good luck sorting it out. What kind of laptop is it?

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

It's a Sager, as pointed out in the post. Model number is 2200T.

Doesn't look like a connector problem with my current information:( see later post on the subject.

[martling.livejournal.com]

You should try and get hold of a multimeter somehow, but in the meantime:

Check if the power supply is getting to the laptop. Plug the adapter in and use two bits of wire to very briefly make a short circuit between the pins on the plug that goes into the laptop. If there's voltage there, you'll get a spark. If so, the power supply is probably fine (the voltage could be low, but it's usually an all-or-nothing sort of thing).

Also have a good sniff around the laptop from the outside and see if you can detect a burnt-out smell anywhere.

[sci.livejournal.com]

Or if it's a switchmode PSU, doing that for a fraction of a second too long will fuse the powersupply, rendering it very dead.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I really do mean just brushing one wire past the other for a moment. The capacitors'll sink that.

But get a multimeter instead, unless you're in a big hurry to work out what's wrong without one.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

90% of the time that fault is due to the power connector in the laptop breaking it's contacts off the board.

I've repaired such a condition twice before, but it's a real pain of an operation, and usually a bit hit and miss. A slightly better solution is to remove the plug from the laptop, glue it onto the outside, and then run wires from the socket there, to the motherboard. At least it doesn't break again, but it's not ugly as hell, and it's still a pain of an operation to perform.

It's possibly best fixed by a professional; although the cost may make it a better move to just buy another old laptop, since you said yours is quite old.