Dr. Frankenputer

Our computer has been down this weekend. Okay, well that is puting it lightly. Our computer has been down and in pieces. It is finally back together now, but I feel like I've spent the whole weekend in Dr. Frankenstein's lab. We needed to replace the AC port (where we plug in the power cord to charge the battery). Of course this piece would be underneath everything and soldered to the motherboard. So, as you can imagine it was not an easy process. I must admit, I was very nervous about the repair job. I was confident I could get it all back together once I took it apart. My fear, however, was that I wasn't sure it would work after I replaced the part. Well, after literally hours of sitting at the desk working on the thing it worked. The only problem was I accidentally pulled off the recepticle for the cooling fan. I pulled on it a little too hard and it came disconnected from the motherboard. So, back to the soldering iron. This repair was a lot more difficult. There were four leads, very small leads I might add, that had to be attached to the motherboard. Each lead was probably about as thin has a piece of paper. They were also very close together. I discovered that they could not be touching in any way. So a few more hours later and I had a working fan. The only problem is, it runs constantly. It is supposed to only run after triggered by a thermostat like sensor. Whatever I did must have bypassed the sensor. I don't believe this will be a big deal except for annoyance. It's a soft noise, but a constant one nonetheless. Well, here are the pictures from my computer dissection....I'm so glad this one was over!

Look at all those screws. I actually was surprised that I never lost a single screw, and didn't have a single one left over when the computer was reassembled.

You can see the new part on the white piece of shipping foam in the picture below. It went on the upper right hand side on the very end...on the bottom! So, that's why the whole motherboard had to come out.

I probably disassembled and reassembled this computer about 8 times (I'm not exagerating) during this project. Needless to say I didn't need the instructions after the third time. I hope I never have to do that again.