Dell Inspiron M5030 intermittent short

[kschaffner]

Greetings, I should state that I have been a technician for 6 years now and have a good knowledge base for repair. Onto the issue! I have a Dell Inspiron M5030 laptop that has an odd intermittent short. Some history, last week the computer would not draw power from the ac adapter (ac adapter tests fine and tried others) but would power on and run just fine from battery. I disassembled the computer and busted out the multimeter. I traced the power from the dc jack all the way through the battery circuit and pretty much the entire board and everything checked out. I unplugged the ac adapter and hooked up the battery and traced it as well nothing seemed wrong. Upon plugging the AC adapter back into the unit it began to start charging and working as it should. I assumed (bad idea, I know ) that there was just a residual charge in a chip that I cleared with the multimeter. Now 1 week later it is doing the same thing. Traced the power and voila started charging again. There is a grey chip near the DC jack that I was getting the 19.58v on one side and not the other and the chips on the other side were getting the ~12v from the battery. Upon moving my multimeter to the other side of the chip I got a small spark and then the unit started to charge again. Do you think that this is my culprit? I have posted an image to show you where the chip in question is.

http://imgur.com/GHu0d

Thanks for your time!

 

[BarneyBear69]

Hi, I have the same model laptop to be repaired. The brief outline of the problem is that my son sat himself down on the laptop resulting in a broken screen. I was informed by my son that the power adaptor was plugged in at the time. It was subsequently discovered that the power adaptor had developed a fault (low output voltage 14v).With a replacement power adaptor, the laptop still shows no sign of life(no LED's lighting up etc).A number of voltage checks were performed around the DC input jack, but without a circuit diagram it is difficult to trace. Fusible devices on mobo appear ok, but I suspect some safety / protection device has gone O/C. Flexing the mobo has no effect, nosigns of cracks. There appears to be no continuity to earth from the -ve terminal. (Is Centre pin +ve?). Any advice or tips are appreciated!

 

[cherhal]

Hi,

I refurbish laptops and bought a m5030 with a broken screen and no battery. Purchased both and installed them, put in new hard drive installed windows 7 and then started playing with it to make sure everything tested out ok. When I first started it showed plugged in and battery at 100%. I noticed sometime later that it was no longer seeing the ac adapter. I checked the adapter on another machine and it worked fine but the m5030 still didn't see it. I tried another adapter and voila it saw it and started charging. BTW, both adapters were PA-12 family. The next day I started it up and sometime later saw that again it did not see the ac adapter and was not charging. I have now tried everything I could think of, the battery is dead and I'm at a loss as to what to do next. If anyone has any ideas please help!!