Hardware Laptop Issue

[Tom Bombadildo]

Howdy all, having an issue with an old Acer Aspire 5515. I recently replaced the DC port on it, and everything was fine afterwards. It seemed to charge alright, turned on fine without the battery and everything, however I did notice the battery was dying/close to death, so I bought a replacement for it. So the replacement came yesterday, and at first everything seemed to work fine. This morning, however, I attempted to turn it on and...nothing, wouldn't get to the BIOs or anything, just a black screen. So I figured maybe it was the battery, so I took it out and tried turning it on with just the power supply and still nothing.


I suspect it's the motherboard going bad, maybe I fucked up in replacing the DC port or something, but I'd like to be certain before I rip it apart.

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

get a multimeter and check power is making it to the motherboard / battery

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

get a multimeter and check power is making it to the motherboard / battery

Aye, just checked and there's no voltage drops when turning it on and everything.

 

[Isaac]

Is it the moniter?

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

Aye, just checked and there's no voltage drops when turning it on and everything.

so power makes it to the battery terminals too?

have you tried applying pressure to its chipset and trying to power on in case of solder joint fractures

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Is it the moniter?

No, I've tried using an external monitor and that wasn't the issue.

so power makes it to the battery terminals too?

have you tried applying pressure to its chipset and trying to power on in case of solder joint fractures

Yeah, power makes it to the battery terminals.

Just tried and still nothing. There doesn't appear to be any visible damage to anything.

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

are you sure the power button is working correctly? is the ribbon cable damaged in any way? its easy to by accident damage them maybe try holding the power button as you wiggle the ribbon cable to see

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

are you sure the power button is working correctly? is the ribbon cable damaged in any way? its easy to by accident damage them maybe try holding the power button as you wiggle the ribbon cable to see

The laptop turns on, it just doesn't get to the BIOs. The CPU fan starts up and the DVD drive starts up and all.

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

Is the CPU and ram seated correctly? maybe reseat them and the wifi card if its a PCI / PCIE

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Is the CPU and ram seated correctly? maybe reseat them and the wifi card if its a PCI / PCIE

Both appear to be, I've tried reseating the RAM multiple times and the CPU once. I suppose I'll try reseating the Wifi card as well, but I don't think that would matter much.

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

if you leave it does it try to boot windows and you cannot see?

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

It's running Ubuntu, and I've left it for 5+ minutes and it doesn't boot anything. You can tell, as capslock/numslock won't activate either (they do when starting up on default).

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

Starting to sound like the motherboard is toast mate

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Figures. That's alright, didn't have many plans for this thing anyways.

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

Sorry I couldn't be more help to you

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Ok, so here's an interesting development. On a whim I put the old battery in to see if it'd boot that way and...well it boots fine. However, it refuses to boot with the power supply plugged in and will only sometimes turn on with the battery. There are also a few graphical issues as well (see the screenshot), and sometimes when the power supply gets plugged in it causes the laptop to crash. Perhaps the onboard GPU isn't getting enough/is getting too much voltage? Or maybe it's just dying? I tested some games and such, and they seem to work fine without any glitches.

Screenshot:

Spoiler

 

[Issac]

Can it be something like the DC port has the wrong something (resistance, watt, ampere, ohm... i don't know), that makes the computer go apeshit when it's plugged in. And when you use the battery it runs normally?

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Can it be something like the DC port has the wrong something (resistance, watt, ampere, ohm... i don't know), that makes the computer go apeshit when it's plugged in. And when you use the battery it runs normally?

It's possible.


When on battery only it still has the same glitches, but doesn't randomly crash.

 

[Issac]

The glitches might be from the (I guess built in) graphics card getting toasted (as a consequence of the DC port thingy), just like the Wii had graphic glitches due to overheating... perhaps.. (just spittin out ideas)

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

Still seems to me the motherboard is toast on this one, its a good sign it fired up but that graphical glitch on a 2D object deffo doesn't look good

Its plausible the chipset is going out (since im going to assume its not an i series cpu that chipset is controlling a lot more)

one outsider idea and please note im not held responsible for damage to the motherboard although it looks like your buggered eather way is this

this is something I did to a Acer Aspire 5100 and it fixed it up and that laptop is still going to this day about 9 months later!

http://www.kouenstechcorner.com/acer-aspire-5100.html