Waaaaa, I broke my laptop. . .boo hooo hooooo

miwise · 11-05-2006, 09:16 AM

Well, I purchased a cheap DC-DC car adapter off ebay

and tried to run my laptop off it. Long story short, I now either need to replace my motherboard or the whole laptop

(probably the latter). Well, the reason for this post is quite simple. I just wanted to warn everyone to stay away from non-major brands for their power concerns. All name brand for me from now on. The bad thing is that I had a targus power supply, but was missing the plug for my laptop from it. I know the voltage on it can be adjusted, but there is no switch to do so. It seems to use some sort of resistor or something based on the tip you choose. Oh well, I'll probably just go with the ITX as it seems to be much less headache involved in hooking it up and can accept a wider voltage range input.

miwise · 11-06-2006, 07:37 AM

Woo Hoo!! Found a new laptop motherboard for my pavilion. Back in business again! Hooray!!!!!!!!

walky_talky20 · 11-07-2006, 12:22 AM

I agree, don't skimp on laptop power supplies. My cousin lost his Toshiba's factory power supply, bought a cheap ($12) replacement on eBay. There was smoke and awful smell. Needless to say, the laptop was out of commission.

I was lucky enough to find a parts laptop on eBay (go figure) for ~$50. Broken Screen, no HDD, keyboard, floppy, cd-rom, or battery. Swapped the motherboards and bought a used Factory power supply. Back up and running.

miwise · 11-07-2006, 09:13 PM

Well, found a new mobo for about 100 dollars on ebay. CPU is a bit faster too. I'll be buying the carnetix psu for it. One other question though. Can the heat from a solder iron damage the components on the motherboard (even if the solder iron didn't touch the component)? What is the best way to solder a wire onto the power switch? Here's how I did it and it worked at first:

1. Applied some solder to the wire while heating the wire up.
2. Touched wire to contact on motherboard switch.
3. Heated solder to melting point (fairly hard to do on the mobo b/c of the tight space, even with the mobo out of the case)
4. After soldering the power wires to the power switch, there was less impedence on the power switch circuit (guessing that it may have been touching something?)

I hate dealing with solder b/c I'm not really good at it and don't really know the correct procedure for applying it or even if my solder iron is good enough for the job I using it for. I have a solder gun (which has 2 settings for heat) but its a bit large for the area I'm trying to solder. I used a 10 dollar solder iron from walmart. Thanks!