I got a call from a guy two days ago about his Toshiba Satellite L305-S5919 laptop. He said the DC jack was messed up, and he wanted me to take a look at it. When he brought me the laptop, I looked at the jack and it was extremely loose. It looked like a fun soldering job, so naturally I got started fairly quickly.
The first thing I did (of course) was to remove all of the components from the bottom of the laptop. In this case, all I had to remove was the RAM and the hard drive (there was no battery in the laptop when I got it).
I had never worked on this particular model before, but I was assuming that taking the plastic bottom off of the laptop would be the logical next step. To do this, I removed 13 screws labeled “F6″ and three (under where the battery should have been) labeled “F3″. Some of them proved difficult to remove from their inset holes. In fact, one screw refused to come out of its hole. After this attempt appeared to be fruitless, I started looking for a different way to get into the laptop. I finally discovered that the bezel on the top of the laptop came off.
After removing the bezel, all I had to do was remove two screws, then pry the keyboard up. Next it was just a matter of folding it over:
…then, detaching the ribbon cable and removing the keyboard.
I decided to remove all of the screws I found under the keyboard. The top cover appeared loose, so I started to pry the cover off starting with the plastic at the hinges. It didn’t want to come open, and I then remembered the screw that wouldn’t come out. I tried to coax it out for a little while longer, then gave it up. I wondered if the screw was just not coming out of the plastic, but wasn’t holding anything together, so I pulled on the top cover gently and I felt it give away a little bit. I then removed the touchpad cable and the wire to the speakers, and the top finally popped off. Success!
Then I took a look at the DC power jack. Look at what I saw:
The jack had just popped out of its slot! All I had to do was slip it back in, and I was done.
…or so I thought. Apparently I had dropped a screw down in the laptop. Dropping a screw into a laptop is pretty much a computer repairman’s worst nightmare – particularly when it goes into the CPU fan. That’s exactly what I did, of course. I ended up having to take the motherboard completely out, then turn it around to dump the screw out of the fan. If you haven’t had the pleasure to remove a motherboard from a laptop before, let’s just say it’s a balancing act of putting enough pressure on the board to figure out what’s keeping it from popping out (there’s always something in the way) and not putting too much pressure on the board so that you don’t break it. Anyways, while I was at it I thought you might enjoy seeing the gutted laptop.
From there, I just reversed my steps to put the laptop back together. I didn’t get to do any soldering, but it did turn out to be a fun disassembly of a laptop. After I put the laptop back together, I discovered that even when plugging the adapter into the DC jack it wouldn’t turn on. I tested the adapter, and I discovered that both the adapter was bad too. My guess is that when the wire inside the adapter broke, the customer wiggled the cord to the point where the jack came out of its slot.
I ordered a new adapter, and the shipment was here in two days (thank you Amazon!)
P.S. The customer picked up the laptop this evening, and he seemed pleased. I was happy to give him a quick turnaround while working during the day, especially since I even had to have the adapter shipped! 