Wheeeeeeeeee!

[ciphergoth]

Thanks to the steady soldering hands of conflux I am bathing in the joy of internetty goodness again. Thank you so much, David!

Now we have to do the same thing to Jess's laptop...

Comments

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

You're soldering your laptop to the internet? Now that's serious dedication...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

If I could, I would!

My and Jess's matching laptops developed the same fault - the power socket lost its connection to the motherboard, so they couldn't power up any more. No Wi-Fi laptops == no internet!

[phantas.livejournal.com]

When I was a freshm(wo)man, long before WiFi and such, me and my mates would simulate plugging a lan cable to an arm vein as a running joke about our net/'puter dependency...

[reddragdiva]

Ooh, that one's a bugger. To the point where it's common on some crappy laptops and you can get replacement power sockets in packs of 10 on eBay.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It's v shoddy design - the power connector is a huge bulky thing and the socket is soldered direct to the motherboard. To make it worse, it's octagonal rather than round, so it can even apply torsional stresses. If they can't make the connector smaller and lighter, they should make the socket case-mounted - or failing that, build in some flexibility into the thing.

Of course, those magnetic power connectors that Macs have are my current objects of desire.

[reddragdiva]

Presumably it saves five cents to do it that way.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Indeed. TBH the last option (making a more flexible socket-mounted connector) is probably the only one they could do that wouldn't cost more than a couple of cents; given that *both* our laptops failed this way, it would probably be worth it to their image since I'll have a hard time telling people to get the same model of laptop after this.

[reddragdiva]

Yuh. Compaqs (HP and pre-HP) are notorious for it. What are yr laptops?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Dell Latitude X1. Lovely machines apart from this one thing.

All they have to do is shape the plastic and the metal in the connector so that when it bends, it doesn't exert force on the solder joins to the motherboard. Can that really be so hard?

And where on earth does your icon come from?

[reddragdiva]

Per my icon list, found for me by rosefox :-) Apple changed to an Ubuntu.

Dell Latitude X1 Power Connectors Suck! HELP!

[(Anonymous)]

So I just came across this thread and my X1 has suffered the same problem but I dont have a mate to fix her up for me so I will be attempting this myself. I will also attempt to document everything as I go on my blog http://www.askTheAdmin.com I was wondering if your guru replaced the connector or just resoldered?

Any help would be appreciated as I am staring over my disected X1 with a soldering gun contemplating jumping in...

HELP!

Re: Dell Latitude X1 Power Connectors Suck! HELP!

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

My guru just resoldered the connections. Sadly they started to fail again within a couple of months.

The problem has gone away for us now, as both our Latitude X1s have been stolen!