dinsdag 6 april 2010

Dell Mini 9 broken power connector

Broken
Oops this is the second time I’ve seen this, a loose middle pin on a Dell Mini 9 power connector. The first time it was not my own laptop, my sister-in-law had her Mini 9 for only 3 to 5 weeks. I blamed her for not being careful with her brand new laptop. Now it happened to mine. So now it happened to two of the four Mini 9 laptops I know, this was worth closer inspection.

So here’s the problem:



So what happened?
Unlike most laptops the power connector in the mini 9 is not soldered on the motherboard like most laptops. This had its advantages. When you trip over the charger wire most laptops have a motherboard with a connector broken loose, traces can be torn off the pcb or it can even leave burn marks (I see these every year, perhaps an other blog). Anyways with the dell mini 9 it’s a separate connector and this would be nice it it wasn’t such a flawed one.

The center pin of the connector is soldered to a wire, this wire is held in place by some shrink-wrap …. This shrink-wrap gets pulled back if some force (pulling out the power supply) gets applied.


So now fix this
The fixing this is pretty easy, open up the laptop, pull/push the pin back in its place and glue it so it will stay it the right spot.
My first attempt was just to plug in the psu and glue the pin, this does not work, the pin does not get pushed back far enough. More successful was to push it with some tweezers and glue it with a hot glue gun.





My laptop works fine again. Took me an hour, less then fixing a connector on a bigger laptop.