Before
After
We recently had a Compaq Presario R3000 in for a power jack repair. We took some before and after photos of the solder connections for the power jack. In the “before” photo, the black lines ringing the solder connections is where the solder joint cracked and broke the electrical connection. No rings are evident after a new power jack was soldered on.
Fixing display problems is one of our most frequent repair tasks. In our work we have dealt with many different causes of display failure. Here are the 6 most frequent ones.
Over the past 3 years most laptop screens have been switched over from a roughened glass surface to a smooth anti-reflection coated surface. While it was ok to clean the old style screens with an alcohol-based cleaner such as Windex, doing so for a glossy screen will damage the coating, eventually turning it yellow. There are several non-alcohol based screen cleaners out there some of which can be ordered online and some bought at an office supply store. Here’s a link to further discussion on the topic.
If you experience white vertical lines on your laptop screen (in this case, a Toshiba Satellite P35), then the circuit board in the screen assembly is going bad. The whole screen assembly needs to be replaced.
We recently did a screen replacement on a Sharp Actius MM-20 ultraportable notebook. This is a 4 year old laptop with a low production volume, so a new replacement screen was nowhere to be found. What we ended up doing is waiting for a “dead” Actius to come up on auction on eBay and purchasing it. We then used the screen from the dead laptop for the replacement. So, if you are unable to find a new replacement part, sometimes the best option is to buy a non-functioning model and salvage the replacement parts.
I ran across this post in a Craigslist forum:
…Ok, here’s what i did, since people urge me not solder new dc jack myself, so i called Laptop repair service in beaverton area. They told me that the charge cost is going to be $150. But if i took out the motherboard (which they only need motherboard) it would cost $75 (to solder) . So i did took out part and gave to tech guy in Laptop Reapir service to solder the new one ( they provide the part, not the one i order from the internet). total soldering time was 1 hour. So, i took it back and reassembled the laptop and powered it up. The good part was that power came up, but it keeps rebooting itself every 5 seconds and it seem the monitor doesn’t come on at all…
To me, this is crazy! In order to take the motherboard out, you need antistatic protection and antistatic packaging as well as specialized knowledge on how to take the motherboard out and how to keep track of the connectors and the screws. As evidenced in the post above, the results speak for themselves. And if you do have all the skills, why not just finish the job yourself and solder the jack. Otherwise, do me a favor, send the whole laptop in (but not to this guy!).