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Sony Vaio VGN-N31Z/W not switching on

reuben — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:38:57 +0000

The symptom was first seen just after a lightening strike where the laptop was disconnected from the mains however it was connected to an ADSL modem which in turn was connected to a PSTN telephone line. This could have been the source of the Voltage spike that could have damaged the laptop.

After connecting the power supply to the laptop there was absolutely no power, not even the battery LED, it remains dead. I removed the battery and tried with just the power supply but still no power up. The battery was discharged so it was useless to check power up on the battery however I still tried but nothing positive.

Dismantling procedure.

Unscrewed RAM compartment to remove RAM and to see if there were any hidden screws and in fact there are.
Removed the 2 CDROM screws to extract the cdrom from the main chassis.
Removed 13 screws from the bottom chassis another 2 from the RAM compartment and another 3 from the battry section. three other screws were removed from the CDROM section.
Unclipped the 5 keyboard clips to remove the keyboard from the top chassis section.
1 hidden screw was removed from under the keyboard.
Removed the connection cable for the touchpad from the motherboard.
Removed the top chassis entirely so no I could see the top part of the motherboard.
Removed 3 screws that connect the Mboard to the bottom chassis.
Removed cable clip from the top section which also held the video and WIFI cables.
Removed two hard drive screws to release mboard.
Unplugged video cables from the mboard and other minor connectors.
The mboard could now be removed.
No visible physical damage can be seen however I tested if power was actually reaching vital parts on the motherboard.
The motherboard can be declared as dead. so it needs to be replaced.

Hp 510 Laptop memory upgrade

reuben — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:26:09 +0000

This very nice model made by Hp has very nice looks, great touch pad and sleeky design especially the way the lid opens. Over all performance is very satisfying with its standard 512 Mbytes DDR memory which comes with it. This specific model has a Ramaxel 512 Mbytes PC2-5300S SODIMM chip.

I first wanted to know what was the maximum memory upgrade I could perform on it so as to see what options I had. One very big flop which I consider very uncomfortable is that this HP 510 model has only one bank for a memory module thus I could not add say two chips of RAM to have a better possibility of upgrade.

So Checking Online I found this manual which can be downloaded from the following link for the HP 510. I found out that I could only boost this baby up to 1 Gig of RAM so even though I could double its RAM capacity I still was not very content but that was the reality so I had to abide to it.

As you can see from the following diagram the HP 510 has a simple way of upgrading by simply unscrewing this screw as shown hereunder and hola you find the RAM accompanied by its’ neighbouring Wireless card which you do not need to touch. Just flip the two notches outwards and the RAM module should flip itself up by its own. Try not to touch the contacts or any of the surface mount components.

Grab the new corsair DDR2 PC667 SODIMM and slide it through in its place without exerting too much force. Once done you should here the two side clips make the usual clipping noise and holla the RAM is in. Just put the back panel in again and secure the panel with the screw.

Flip the laptop up again and check it out. The OS should theoretically boot at a faster rate. If you wanna check out if the RAM upgrade is complete just check out the system information through the windows control panel, there it should give you a better view if the memory module has been accepted by the system.

I noticed a drastic increase in speed with just a 1gig module obviously using windows XP SP2..

Acer travelmate 4000 liquid spilt

reuben — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:23:46 +0000

An unlucky occurrence where the poor thing has undergone a water proof test which it seems it failed. I received this LAPTOP as new as it could be hardly ever used but it had been maltreated with soft drink and reported to never switch back on again.

So I first checked where the spill came from however it seemed that the splash has hit almost every vent. So here we go with the dismantling process of this Acer 4000 travelmate.

Toshiba Satellite switching off due to CPU fan malfunction.

reuben — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:34:45 +0000

Upon switching on the laptop immediately boots without problems. Once the laptop is booted and kept operating for some while it just switches off without shutdown as if there was a power malfunction.

My first impression was that something was not working fine with the battery however I immediately changed my mind after using the laptop on the power pack and ending with the same result.

I booted into safe mode and left idle for some time and nothing happened however exactly after using the laptop with simple functions like word and other utilities the problem came out again by just switching off.

I gave a look to the event viewer to see whether there were any specific errors however I found none. So the problem must have been something else.

I decided to dismantle the laptop to have a better view of the problem.

first remove any peripherals that can be clipped off like the battery the CD Rom, the hard drive.
then start by removing the top speakers mesh as a whole. this has multiple clips so pay attention.
Unscrew the keyboard and detach safely by also unplugging the ribbon cable slowly.
Then you need to unscrew the screen screws from the back and top part to disconnect it entirely. Pay attention for the black and white cables that come from the WIFI network card.
Unscrew the top screws of the top chassis and then flip over the laptop to unscrew the lower ones.
Once this is done the lower part should come off also through un-clipping some clips from the front end.
Once done the top part should come apart always pay attention to the ribbon cables of the various devices.
Have a look at the images to get a better idea of the parts and screws.

Once I performed the dis-assembly I started a visual inspection mostly of the power section which did not have any negative results. Everything seemed in place.

However looking at the connectors of the CPU fan I found out that it was not inserted well in place firmly so with a finger I pushed it in place. I suspected that this might have been the problem since the fan never ever triggered not even at boot up. With other laptop it is very common that they power up the fan as a test as soon as the laptop is switched on.

So re-mounting everything in place and giving the initial power to the laptop I found out that the problem was all about that simple connector that was not in place. The fan immedaitely powered up and the laptop never suffered overheating again.

HP Compaq NX 9005

reuben — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:27:13 +0000

This Laptop Was reported to have the screen faint after a specific amount of time. Although this is usually associated directly with the screen itself I decided to have a better look inside prior to giving the final verdict to the issue.

Model:-HP Compaq NX9005

CPU – AMD Athlon XP-m

The fault manifested only after a certain amount of time so the following tests were performed to verify the symptoms.

Powered on with power supply and left idle for a certain amount of time where the fault did not manifest.
The next test was to run several tests like opening multiple programs and changing from one program to another like running streaming on Microsoft Media player and browsing a heavy website. Still the screen did not fade away at all.
Ran De fragmentation and other heavy tasks to warm up the system.
After several tries and a long time after the Laptop was on the fault started to display the symptoms by slowly fading away.
Turned off and left to cool down.
Turned the laptop back on but this time in safe mode and ran similar tests and the same problem was noticed so the problem is surely with the hardware.
Turned on batteries and the problem took longer to manifest since the laptop takes more time to heat up when running on batteries.
The next process was to dismantle the laptop and have a better look at the board.

Disassembly procedure.

The first task was to remove all the possible periferals like the hard drive, the ram, the cd rom and keyboard off the way as these are usually clip on stuff that can be remove easily.
THe nect step was to disconnect the screen from the board and unplug the wireless antenna then remove the screen all the way off.

After Doing so the bottom screws were removed and the upper chassis could be clipped off.

Screwed off the mboard screws and remove the board from the lower chassis of the laptop.

On inspecting the board there seemed to be no problems with the video connector and no problems with the pinouts. I looked at the connector with a good lens and this is highly advised since most soldering issues cannot be easily detected especially on these types of boards.

Nothing seemed to be bad with this board so I decided that it must be the screen.