Professional Documents
Culture Documents
this first. I’ll guide you away from making costly mistakes that
could render your laptop computer useless.
Keep in mind that if you are playing with the LCD the backlight
inverter can give you a nasty shock if the unit is powered, switch
the laptop off and unplug it, you should also remove the laptop's
battery and hard drive.
Note: Some laptops have the screw holes marked with screw
types and sizes. Some use symbols to indicate screw types. Take
notice of what screws come out of where.
DON’T tilt the machine upside down or on its side (if you do feel
the need it's better to tilt it to the side that houses the CDROM as
the CDROM area inside the machine has less components on it
than the mainboard).
This diagram shows what a basic keyboard looks like, the ribbon
cable which connects the keyboard to the motherboard is
indicated by the red arrow.
The ribbon cable can also be located on the front edge of the
keyboard depending on the age and model of the laptop you
have.
Note the keyboard holder (thin strip of plastic) that sits on the
top edge of the laptop keyboard needs to be removed to get
access to the screws holding the keyboard down.
Most of the current laptop keyboards are like the diagram below.
You may need some tweezers and a steady hand to fix these.
The best thing I can suggest is to gently remove one of the other
keys to see exactly how the mounting arms sit, once you have an
idea of how it should look grab those tweezers and be patient, it
may take some time.
We will soon have some detailed photos showing how these are
assembled, until then remember to be patient and gentle.
SCREEN
If the Inverter fails then you appear to have no display, yes and
no, the screen is still displaying the image but without light from
the tube it only appears ever so faintly.
A lot of
repairers will make the
assumption that the LCD
has failed and tell you
about the
enormous cost involved in a laptop screen repair to
resurrect your beloved laptop, if you're unlucky this may be the
case. Some repairers may even tell you it’s the main board
because the video card has failed, they'll tell you that your laptop
screen repair will involve replacing expensive circuit cards..
rubbish.
You will need to remove the mask assembly which is the plastic
outer border around the screen. If you are the type to be a little
heavy handed and impatient, then this is not the task for you.
Working around an expensive LCD panel is only for people who
have the utmost confidence in what they're doing, the average
LCD panel makes up 50% of the overall cost of a laptop and in
some cases replacement costs are huge. (Be patient and use
minimal force)
Once you’ve taken that off, you'll have exposed the LCD and
inverter which will both be connected to the LCD harness or wire
loom that connects them both to the main board.
Disconnect the inverter from the harness and from the LCD (the
inverter will have a cable plugged into both ends of it) now..
here’s the thing. In a lot of cases your laptop screen repair is just
a case of cleaning the inverter pins with some contact cleaner
and this will fix the issue for a good while.
The reason is that the pins develop a film on them and lose good
connection with the plug that is plugged into them, it’s a good
idea to clean the harness plug as well.
If you want to achieve a more permanent fix you will need to
apply some Glue (Threebond 1530B) to the end that the harness
plugs into (plug number 2, see left image), this will prevent the
dirt film forming again on the pins over time.
OVERHEATING
Laptop Overheating Issues:
Does your laptop shutdown at random? Does it slow down during
heavy operations? Do you need to wait 10 min. before you can
start it up again? These are all the symptoms of a laptop
overheating problem in or around the cooling system.
On the under side of a lot of the machines you can gain access to
the CPU/cooling module compartment, be warned – when
tinkering around near the CPU, electro static discharge may be
your worst nightmare - be careful to control ESD. Once you have
located where the fan is you will be able to see quite clearly if
this is your issue.. take a look below.
1: Heat sink
2: Fan
You can use a soft paint brush safely enough here to loosen all
the dust and then use a vacuum with a brush attachment to
remove it. If you're game you can take the fan out (2 screws to
remove) and give it a good clean out. This isn’t always so easy,
on other models of notebooks the fan or fans are only accessible
by removing the main board, not a job for a novice.
Once all the dust and lint is removed, re-assemble your machine.
This procedure is something that should be done periodically to
ensure that your laptop overheating issues will be a thing of the
past.
HARD DISK
Keep in mind too that new laptop hard drives are shipped
un-partitioned and not formatted just the same as normal
IDE drives, hopefully you still have your recovery CD’s that
came with your laptop, if not don’t worry you can use a
Windows CD to rebuild your laptop from scratch and then
access the internet at some stage to download drivers
specific to your laptop (generally available from the laptop
manufacturer's website).
BATTERIES
OK, bad news first. There isn't much you can do to repair your
laptop battery. There are companies that claim they can do what
they call repacking or reconditioning but what you will find is the
end result may not be worth the money spent on this service, not
to mention that laptop manufacturers don’t recommend the
practice.
To sum it all up, best practice here if you need to repair your
laptop battery because it's not charging is just to replace it with a
brand new one and avoid any warranty or safety issues.
This will result in the loss of sound through the laptops internal
speakers or through the headphone jack itself.
Here’s where you need to pray that the laptop you have has the
headphone jack mounted on a separate daughter or minor board
(PCB). Unfortunately if the headphone jack is mounted on the
main board you could be looking at big $$ (main boards here in
Australia can cost anything from $400.00 - $2500.00).
Please see diagrams below.
The DC jacks on these units are weakened over time with general
use and become unstable and loose, in some cases detaching
themselves from the main board altogether.
In the one we have pictured the plug detached from the board
completely and had to be resoldered and modified due to the
rear pin connection breaking away from the plug. You can see
the red wire which had to be added to replace the broken pin,
this won't always have to be done.
Once the plug has had all of its board mounted points resoldered
it is advisable to add an epoxy resin around the outer edge of the
plug to fix it to the main board, this will minimise movement
when the adapter is plugged into it. I generally use Araldite.
If you need to repair your laptop power plug, this fix will work
well in just about any make of machine.
What I can also say is that even your local authorised repair
centre for all the brand name laptops don’t go to this much
trouble either. I have personally been present for a number of
different manufacturers service calls and witnessed how they
operate.
For example -
If you log a call for your Acer laptop which is in warranty, the
technician will turn up (for onsite warranty ) with a fist full of
spare parts. He will take a quick look at the machine, keeping in
mind they already have a fault description and have narrowed it
down prior to turning up. After looking at the machine and
verifying it has a fault they will basically gut the machine and
rebuild it with new internal parts.
Here are some things you can do to isolate what sort of problem
you have, you may think you'll have to undertake some sort of
laptop motherboard repair but quite often the motherboard gets
blamed for a fault that may be somewhere else in your machine.
Your screen goes dim and appears to switch off whilst in use.
- Try the machine using an external screen.
You can already get some idea here of what may be the problem,
if the external screen is working it may be the LCD or the
inverter board.
You could now suspect the video card or chipset, in which case
you would need to find out whether the video chipset is part of
the motherboard or on a separate PCB.
Another example.
External port faults are common, like USB ports and headphone
jacks. An easy way of determining these sorts of faults is to plug
in as many different devices that suit to see if it is indeed the
port or the device which is faulty. Also try uninstalling then
reinstalling the USB device. If the function doesn’t return after
this sort of work then you can go one step further and reinstall
Windows (or Linux) using your recovery cd’s or your own created
SOE , remember to BACKUP your data first.
If the fault is still present after this then you can assume that
your hardware is to blame for the issues. Finding out what part
the actual hardware (USB ports) are located on should be your
next step. These sort of ports are not always located on the main
board and will often be found on a smaller less expensive board.
Do your testing using normal basic methods to determine as
closely as you can what part may be causing your problem then
seek some advice from a professional to see if their opinion is the
same.
Well, it's our opinion that the difference between the two varies
according to the region or country you're in, nothing much else.
Laptop/Notebook Laptop/Notebook
Bluetooth
Bluetooth function is largely generic in its methods of connecting,
basically you need to activate BT function on the phone and the
laptop and have them discover each other to form a connection.
This is a simplified explanation but it's not difficult to do,
remember if you do have problems to refer back to the user
manual for the phone or get on the net to troubleshoot, this
applies to all the connection methods we refer to.
Infrared
With every laptop you buy you will receive in some form a
recovery image which is basically the manufacturers pre-
installed, pre-tested and pre-proven software load that works
specifically for the model machine you have.
Some hardware is generic and runs fine with native drivers found
within Windows already. Devices like hard drives, floppy drives,
CD and DVD ROM drives are generally detected and functional
without loading any specific drivers.
In fact if you have a problem with your laptop and you call the
vendors support line they will more often than not ask you to run
the product recovery software (either from the supplied laptop
recovery CD’s or from a hidden partition on the hard disk) to rule
out your problem being a software issue, which isn’t generally
covered under the manufacturers warranty.
If you call for support and you don’t have the vendors software
loaded (if you have wiped the machine and just reinstalled
Windows) you may not get assistance until you reload the
vendors software.
Then put the floppy into your machine and boot it up, you'll be
asked for a password, just press Enter. Then when you're asked
to set the password, type Y then Enter, this will get you into the
bios configuration where you can then type in a new password.
Aside from the KeyDisk, you can build a parallel Loopback plug,
this is a simple device that plugs into the parallel port of the
machine and removes the password when you boot it up.
To make it you will need a 25 pin DB25 plug, take the plug apart
and join these pins using some old cable;
Pins: 1-5-10, 2-11, 3-17, 4-12, 6-16, 7-13, 8-14, 9-15, and 18-
25
Plug it into your parallel port and boot up your machine, the
password should be removed as soon as it boots.
CG Security
CG Security have a utility available that claims to work for a
range of Toshiba bios passwords as well as the following
machines;
• ACER/IBM BIOS
• AMI BIOS
• AMI WinBIOS 2.5
• Award 4.5x/4.6x/6.0
• Compaq (1992)
• Compaq (New version)
• IBM (PS/2, Activa, Thinkpad)
• Packard Bell
• Phoenix 1.00.09.AC0 (1994), a486 1.03, 1.04, 1.10 A03,
4.05 rev 1.02.943, 4.06 rev 1.13.1107
• Phoenix 4 release 6 (User)
• Gateway Solo - Phoenix 4.0 release 6
• Toshiba
• Zenith AMI
The utility also has the ability to restore, backup and erase/kill
cmos. There is also some info about generic passwords for Award
motherboards.
NOTE:
All the following models use the same password removal process.
TECRA S1
TE 2300
Before we go into the easiest way to backup your laptop data, I'll
first cover what is an SOE. In the corporate world IT or IS
departments create what they refer to as a Standard Operating
Environment (SOE) which enables them to service and support
an environment which doesn’t differ too much from user to user.
This can save a huge amount of time and money in support when
they can solve a lot of issues users are having without going to
great lengths to diagnose them.
Once you have the machine running the way you like it, you need
to create an image file. This is done by using software like Ghost
(by Symantec), Drive image, True Image, Acronis True Image or
the like. These software packages are made to be quite simple.
The image can be stored on DVD (recommended) or on a backup
partition on the hard drive, this is only possible if your drive has
already been partitioned in this way. If not then another software
package like “Partition Magic” may be required.
I suggest for example if you have a 20GB drive then you can split
the drive into two 10GB halves, installing all your software on the
C:/ partition and using the D:/ to backup your laptop data. This
is to safeguard your image if the Operating System becomes
corrupt. Keep the second partition for saving your backup laptop
data files and your SOE image. In all cases I recommend you
keep copies of the image on DVD as well as on your hard drive,
but that’s just me..
Job done, now in the event of you getting a nasty virus or your
hard disk crashing, you have complete snapshot image of your
system which includes all your backup laptop data files as well.
Depending on what laptop backup software you used to create
the actual image file will affect how it is reloaded back onto your
system. For example, if you have used Ghost you can use a
Ghost boot disc (floppy) to boot your machine giving you access
to the DVDROM or you may be able to create a bootable CD.
Your image can then be reloaded back onto your hard drive using
the boot floppy or CD, whichever you've created.
Note: You cannot load an image on the same drive it's stored on.
So if you have your SOE image stored on your C: and you try
and restore it back onto your C: it will fail, this is the importance
of having the image file (SOE) on another partition or DVD disc
as Ghost and other apps. enable you to image Partition to
Partition and DVD to Partition. Your backup laptop data files
should also be stored on this partition.
Some things to consider are that some of these solutions are less
reliable than others.
The documents are mainly in PDF format with the odd one or two
in .zip or .rar compressed packages.
Please select the appropriate manual for your machine from the
list of manufacturers below.
HP/Compaq
HP
Compaq
Note: There is quite a bit of interchangeability between Compaq
and HP machines so if you can't find the service manual for your
machine in the Compaq section please check the HP section.
Acer
FRC Tech apologises for any inconvenience but due to a request
from Acer we have removed the Acer service and repair manuals
from our site. We've been advised not to make these manuals
available in any way so please don't contact us asking for a
particular manual to be emailed to you etc