Alienware Laptop vs POWER SURGE - Can I Fix It?

I paid 300 for a broken Alienware gaming

laptop

to see if I could fix it. The seller said there was a

power

surge

and then it never worked again. These

laptop

s cost between seven and eight hundred dollars used on eBay, so if I can fix them up. no expensive parts it's definitely worth it this video is sponsored by iFixit we'll talk more about them in a minute so first let's plug in a charger and see what happens we don't have any lights or anything there's just no

power

so let's get the back cover. removed take a look inside now before you start, it's important to note that I'm not a laptop repair technician.

I repair laptops from time to time, but sometimes I also try to fix them and am unsuccessful. I'm definitely not a laptop expert so most of what I do is just experiment and have fun to see if I can do it Now that all that's said I'm going to plug in the AC adapter right here this is where it plugs in and then this wire goes to the board right here, so this is the power input. I have verified that the AC adapter is in good condition and outputs the correct voltage, which is approximately 19 volts. I'll set my multimeter to test DC voltage and we'll do that. go down here to the input voltage and see if we have 19 volts and we do that the voltage goes into these five pins here on the connector and then it goes through here 19 volts on both sides of those and then it comes to these mosfets 19 volts here zero volts there, but do the mosfets turn on?

No, no, they are not told to turn on, so I am going to disconnect the power and test for shorts, just go to resistance mode. We have one of our probes on the ground, if we connect our other probe to the ground, we should hear a beep like that telling us that there is very little or no resistance from one probe to the other, so if we test right here there should be no beep and there is no beep and then if we test the mosfets there should be no beep, there is no beep at all so so far it's good news, this side of the mosfet is not connected to ground, this side of this mosfet is connected to ground so the next thing we need to figure out is is this chip shorted this chip is shorted or this chip is shorted this chip here is an ISL 88739a unfortunately there is not even a data sheet on this and no schematics for this laptop I'm just guessing that it's possible some other component is shorted, but I think probably our best bet here is to start removing these chips.

I'm going to remove this chip first because it's the easiest to remove and then once it's removed we'll double check for shorts and that chip is gone. the one that's shorted, then I'll try to remove this one, if not, I'll remove this one and we'll just scale it down to see which of these chips is shorted. What I'm going to do is cover it with tape. all these components over here that are plastic with capton tape that will protect them from the heat, so I'm going to use my hot air soldering station to apply enough heat to this chip to melt the solder and that will allow me to remove it and then I'm going to use my multimeter to go back Let's check if there are short circuits here we are still short circuited, okay, next we will eliminate this tip.

I feel like this is probably the problem. I was going to remove this one first, but I feel like this might be like this, I'm going to remove that one and with that one removed, do we still have a short? No we don't so I'm going to put the Mosfet back in and recheck for shorts and make sure the Mosfet is not faulty either. I'm going to put some flux in to help the solder flow. Unfortunately, this chip is out of stock everywhere I could find, including AliExpress, so that's usually a problem, luckily though I have a donor board here. and I'm going to steal this chip off the board and hopefully install it on the good board and now that this chip is installed, we need to get under a microscope and look at these joints closely just to make sure that everything is soldered correctly. and then we can also check if there is any other damage that we caused while we were soldering this again.

You've probably noticed me using things like multimeters and tool kits and even some pry tools and various other tools you can buy. stuff directly on the ifixit website ifixit.com tronixfix The best thing about all of their tools is that they have a lifetime warranty, so no matter what you are doing, if something happens to one of their tools, you can contact them to get a free replacement of this bed and The driver kit has almost any bit to open almost any device. This is my favorite kit as it is a little smaller than some of their other kits, but also has a lot of different bits for almost anything.

Another thing I love about iFixit is They have a section on their websites that is just for questions and answers, so if you have any questions about your broken electronic device, you can go directly to ifixit.com and ask them your question; There will be experts online all the time trying to help you. with your question, iFixit is your one-stop shop for parts tools and repair guides and Q&As, and even better, iFixit is a big right-to-repair advocate, so I recommend you visit iFixit ifixit.com tronixfix. I'll leave it. a link right in the description so you can see them and here is the chip under the microscope.

You can see that all of these pens are well soldered to the board, everything is lined up so the chip looks good, let's check the other chip that we soldered. The joints here look like they could use a little touch up. The ones there look good. I don't see a good amount of solder connected from this pad to the chip. I think it's probably underneath, but I want to be sure here. I'm going to apply some flux right here and I'm just going to run my iron over each of these pins and now all of these pins look great too.

One thing we have to do before putting this board back on is to apply the perfect amount of thermal paste. Alien, here we go now with the perfect amount of thermal paste, it will definitely boot up as soon as we install it and power it on, and just when I was ready to reinstall this board, I found that the locking tab on this connector had broken. of the connector so luckily we have a donor board here and I think I can replace this locking tab but it's a real pain so let's take the donor board and see if we can remove it without breaking it and this is what it's supposed to do .

It looks like even though this one is very dirty, I want to clean it first so we can see what we're doing here. Okay, better. This locking tab isn't in the best condition either, but I think it's good enough to be able to remove, hopefully. break something, come on, and I think I just broke a part, but I think I can still get it to work fine, so the problem we have is that each one of these little pens is either broken or bent, so I'm going to have to do that. Kind of fold them back in and then hopefully put that locking tab in there.

I'm not sure I can fold them again. I also think they might be broken, so if you look at that angle you can see. how each of these are a little bent so definitely not what we wanted, they may even be broken, not totally sure yet, I think maybe they are, which means we may need to replace this connector, which means I shouldn't have taken it. the locking tab is off but hey this is the connector on the board that is known to work well or on the donor board and you can see that these pins are much longer than on the other one so I need to remove this whole connector of this board and install it. on the other board, that means we have to try to put this connector back in the place where we removed it.

I see a lot of people talking about how they couldn't do what I do because their hands are too shaky. Mine are also very shaky as you can see in this shot not so much now okay here we go that's what we needed now we can bend them back hopefully yeah I see one broke. I might have to see if I can find a connector like this on a different board. so this is the exact connector I need, this is just the other end of the cable that connects to the touchpad, so I will heat it from the other side to melt the solder that connects this connector to the board and then use this connector to replace the broken one, so since I don't need to save this connector and it's just bad, I'm going to bring my iron and melt all this plastic, melt all these connectors and take them off the board and Once everything is clean, we'll install the new connector on the board and This way we will have a new connector soldered on the board.

All of these pins are soldered nice and solid. The locking tab works great, so let's get this board back. installed in the case and then we can try to turn it on and see what happens. Mounted again on the computer. Now I'm going to reconnect the battery. Look for smoke and no smoke so far. I don't know if there's actually any power in the battery, let's just check right now there's a little bit of voltage, not a lot, so the next thing I'm going to do before I put the back cover on is plug the power adapter in here and then see, first of all if there is any explosion or smoke and then if not we will test and see if there is power getting everywhere it has to be okay here we go let's keep an eye out for fireworks okay nothing is okay so check if power is coming in, we have 19 volts, let's check the power. down on this mosfet 1.8 volts here that's good news let's see if these mosfets are turning on oh no they have 19 volts here and nothing here and also it looks like they are turning black right here so I'm not sure but it's possible We may have burned these two out, so let's turn off the power and check for shorts.

Well, that's not shorted, that's not shorted. Well, we don't have anything shorted. I mean, it's good news these pins here, although I feel like they were. It wasn't that black when I started, so I have a thermal camera attached. I'm going to plug it in and see if anything heats up. Well, actually there is nothing. We've got a little bit of heat down here, but nothing notable it's getting super. warm, so I want to say that's good news. I think that means there's no direct short anyway. We measured and didn't find any, so that's good news.

Now I want to check and see if the battery is charging. Here we have 0.3 volts as far as I can tell, these mosfets are not told to turn on yet and I'm not sure why we have 19 volts coming in here and nothing just comes out and nothing enables them, and as far as I know that is the work of this chip right here, the one we replaced and the battery is not charging at all. Let's try unplugging the battery and plugging it back in and see if that does anything and we still get zero volts and then I'll plug the charger back in and see if that did anything. 0.2 well it's like initially it almost tries to turn on and then it turns itself off that's what it seems like let's try this let's leave our meter plugged in like this unplug it and then plug it back in yeah there we go so it turns on oh now , oh, there we go, now it goes back down, so it turns on initially and after a few seconds it turns off again.

I guess that means something's on. the board that is causing it to shut down. I don't know what that would be. I mean, we made a little progress. At least we have it trying to start. I'm just not sure what would cause it to then regress. off, okay, now with the battery disconnected, we have 19 volts here, we have 19 volts there, we have 24 volts on the trigger pen, so maybe the problem is that we have a bad battery, our voltage stays nice and stable, um. let's see if we have lights on the dash like see if the power button turns on with the battery disconnected it definitely doesn't get power but I know maybe it doesn't turn on if the battery is disconnected it's okay just check it again and see if it still we have energy, yes, there is still energy there.

It's pretty easy, let's replace the battery since we have a donor battery and see if that will make it work and now with the replacement, I hope this works, that would be really good. great, oh, this battery is 11.2 volts, then we'll plug in the charger and nine, oh, 11 volts here, 19 volts, there's still 11 volts in the battery. I feel like I should be charging the battery. 11.66 still stays on 11.11 but I feel like it's not charging this battery hopefully it will charge it let's open it up and see if we have lights or something now that we at least have a good battery definitely no lights here yeah just nothing like that that there is definitely something else going on. here so I just noticed that the battery is actually rated at 11.4 volts it's 11.65 which makes me feel like this battery could be fully charged and maybe it's becauseThat's because the motherboard is not charging the battery now that I could.

I found a schematic for this and on the schematic it says the battery voltage is 12.6 so I don't know if that's an error in the schematic or if this fully charged battery is 12.6 volts. I really don't know if I'm going to move. Power it up and see if we can figure out anything else because I'm not entirely sure if we're looking at something important with this battery charging issue. One thing I noticed on this board is when I plug this power button into this power button on the right. here I was getting the voltage that the power button was supposed to have.

I checked directly on this connector, it's supposed to be 3.3 volts, but when I press the button nothing happens now in that same process. I noticed that the LEDs on this power button do. The LEDs do not work at all. Take 5 volts from this little pin here, so let's check and see how many volts it has, so if we go here, yes, we'll get 0.2 volts, so we're missing a 5 volt rail on this board. Now looking at the schematic, pu501 seems to be the enable chip for the 5 volts, the 5 volts is here, this output pin, here also goes all the way here, so what I have to do now is find this chip on the board and see if it's being enabled, we have one enabled and enabled two here, so pins five and six on pu501 now, unfortunately, I can't get this under my microscope, it's too big, but I found 501, it's located right here, pu501 on the side so we need to check pins five and six we also need to check and make sure that it's getting 19 volts which is the input voltage to the chip so the first thing I want to check on this chip is to see if it has the voltage input that it should have. 19 volts and we have that, so it's pin one, pin two, three, four, five, five and six is ​​here, we have 4.4 volts and we have 3.1 volts, so pin 5 was 4 volts and It says 3 volts, 5 volts, maybe that. it's because it needs to be between three and five volts I really don't know pin 6 the enable pin says 5 volts right here it doesn't have 5 volts but I'm not one hundred percent sure if it needs 5 volts or if that just says this is the enable pin enable for the 5 volt line it has voltage but it doesn't have 5 volts let's check pin 8 for the output voltage which should also be 5 volts and here is pin 8 and we have zero volts so I definitely don't have an output of 5 volts so I think we have a problem with this chip or the chip that sends the enable voltage to this chip as I'm not 100 sure if pin 6 that goes to this chip should be 5 volts or if it's just It should have a certain amount of voltage.

I don't know for sure if this chip is defective or not. I'm going to replace this chip and then see what that reading is if we still don't get the correct readings from this chip. then I'm going to replace the chip that is responsible for putting the 5 volts on pin six, assuming that's what it's supposed to do and now with that chip replaced, let's check again we have 19 volts on 4.4, that's what we had before. and 3.1 is fine and we check the output voltage of pin 9, pin 8. We still have zero volts, which leads me to believe that pin 6 needs five volts to enable this chip, so we have to figure out where the five volts again.

I'm not an expert here, there's a lot I don't know clearly about this, but I think we're making some progress. The battery charger chip was definitely a problem and has now been fixed. This chip doesn't seem to be a problem. Once we figure out where those 5 volts are coming from, maybe we can fix this, after all, unfortunately one of the problems with boards like this that have had a lot of voltage applied to them is that they can burn up a lot of components. and I hope that's not what we're going to find here, but it's definitely possible.

It seems like the more I try and look at things, the more things I find that could be bad, but now let's try to figure out where the chip is. is that it sends the five volts to this chip that we just replaced after looking at the schematics the chip that powers this chip at least as far as I can tell is this chip here unfortunately this chip here is a BGA chip which means that the solder all the balls are under the chip. I don't have what I need to replace this type of chip and I'm honestly not good at it, so unfortunately I think our repair journey ends here.

I hate to say that because we have arrived. so far on this board, but unfortunately I think there's too much energy that went through too many parts of this board and I'll have to call this one unrepairable if you like this type of video, although I'll put a link. on your screen now to see a video that had a slightly different outcome, click on that video and come hang out with me there and see if I can fix that laptop. Thanks again to iFixit for sponsoring this video, thanks for watching and I hope you have a good time abroad.