Alienware Laptop vs POWER SURGE - Can I Fix It?
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- čas přidán 22. 09. 2022
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Alienware Laptop vs POWER SURGE - Can I Fix It? I paid $300 for a broken Alienware Gaming Laptop that the seller said never turned back on after a power surge. The laptop doesn't seem to charge so of course I'll be taking it apart to see what I can figure out and if I can get it working again.
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Seeing an expert saying he's not an good at BGA chips is refreshing for us beginners to know that even experts have their weaker points. Superb video, man 👏👏👏👏👏
I'm an expert with some game console repairs but definitely not with laptops. Large BGA chips can be very difficult to work with
@@Tronicsfix dont lie to us, i understood nothing but maybe one day.
@@Tronicsfix ahh you just being humble man and we love you for that 🙂
Most experts can’t do large bga chips anyways without machine help
@@Tronicsfix indeed
sadly it's impossible to get full datasheets so you did a great job identifying most of the problems, without new spare parts too
Damn, this fix complexity is quite above the usual problems that you have shown us lately. It was great to see you go into the more technical problems of faulty chips in boards but everything has a limit. Great video as always mate!
Everything from your shirt, to the animations you do for the PERFECT amount of thermal paste, your professionalism, and your since of humor is why I watch all your videos! Keep up the great work
Good stuff Steve, sad to see this die. If you want to sell this as is I'd take it just to have a crack at it for a video 😉
And I'd be there to watch the stream! Love yours and Steve's content. Best on the net.
Mmmmmm
Pls do it. I would watch it.
10 out of 10
Entertaining, Informative, Charismatic... what else to ask the is!
You are crazy good bro!
Keep up the good vibes and lets save the broken tech 1 at the time!
This past feww days I've been watching a lot of your videos while I study. It's pretty relaxing to me. Great video btw. Cheers
Glad to hear it! Thanks for the comment
That's one of the main reasons I love watching your channel you don't pretend to know it all!!
Those types of locking tab and connector are the bane of my existence, especially the incredibly small ones on the Nintendo 2DS. Those tabs pop off so easily, but don't reattach at all. What would you suggest in a situation like that?
Great video, as usual, though. I love learning, and being inspired to work, from your videos.
Usually you can slip them back on but it's not easy and takes a lot of patience
I feel that! My first time in a joycon I broke one of those locking tabs. I couldn't find a solution on google so I just had to junk the board. It broke with the tiniest amount of force. It was insane.
good video. I had hi hopes on this one. you were making some really good progress. i wish you would have tried to reflow that last chip.
Nice working on those laptops! Keep it up!
Thanks, will do!
Great work! I always learn something new as you are learning.
Great video, hate see that even with your great expertise you cannot fix it. Always enjoyable and informative keep up on the excellent content you provide.
So glad you enjoyed it!
I commend your efforts in trying to fix this fella.
Nice work, sometimes it’s hard to fix, but you rock
Hey thanks!
Sounds like there is a short circuit somewhere deeper inside the laptop. best thing to do is get some jumper wires onto the board (which bypasses the DC jack and power limiting software) and inject voltage until whatever is shorted heats up.
Oh man I was really hopefull. Very Very goof try though Tronics.
Regarding laptop repairs, There are many custom-made chips that you never ever find anything on the net.
The biggest problem is the spareparts. You cannot find them either.
So, laptop repair means having alot of doner boards. For apple computers that might be possible but for other brands that is just not possible.
BGA is a big problem. Even if you fix, you might damage components on the other side. It is double sided and other BGAs on the other side might be affected.
The holy music for the thermal paste was a great touch
Awesome. Very educational. Thank you
Glad you enjoyed it!
Dang I was hoping it was going to get fixed lol either way loved the video keep it up
For the ball chip thing when i was young i used to work for a phone repair shop most of the times we fixed them by heating them up and just moving it a little so if any ball was connected it got fixed(usually) so you should try at least that maybe
You mean reflowing. Steve did that at some approaches of the Switch for instance however I cannot remember it being helpful in any of his videos.
@@BAERnado I don't know if it helped on his videos but we used to do it on the old phones until 2009 when i left. Putting flux on all the sides and heating it until you can move it just a little with a tiny touch and then try. And plenty of times it was fixed(other times not). Sometimes we removed them completely and put them back again after cleaning the board unless we broke it 🤣 but still i think its worth a try since it doesnt take more than 5 minutes
i love your videos you helped me fix one of my ps5s and other stuff i put my dad on your channel to watch you he likes your videos to
So great to hear!
The best repairing channel 👑
Your follower from Algeria 🇩🇿
Regarding the battery, it is usual for the manufacturer to specify the nominal voltage (in your case 11.4V), which is simply kinda an "average" value, used to calculate the amount of energy stored in Wh (proper way is to integrate the voltage curve from full to empty, but an average works fine), just doing [nominal voltage] x [cell capacity in Ah].
The usual nominal voltage por LiPo and LiIon batteries is 3.7 volts per cell, so 11.1V on a 3S battery. When dealing with HV batteries, this nominal voltage can be a tad higher, so it is not rare to see values like 3.8V/cell (so 11.4V). However since the topping voltage is 12.6V from the schematic I assume in this case alienware is overly optimistic, because that is not HV topping voltage, is standard full cell voltage (4.2V/cell). That battery should probably have a nominal voltage of 11.1V too in order to give a proper Wh estimate, but w/e.
So... well, both of the batteries looked fine to me. I see you traced down a problem with the charging IC and replaced it. Sadly no happy ending!
Is it possible that a resistor leading to the 5V was broken in the the surge? I dealt with a board at work earlier that had to many volts put through it and caused the resistors to crack. Of course it would be hell to track down a pin size hole or hair line fracture on *at least* one of several resistors. Are you able to check any of the parts connected to that leg of the chip using the schematic? Or would that be a waste of time?
Honestly I like your approach on stuff you are not familiar with to broaden your and our views. I would like to see you tapping on reballing though. I believe with your skillset it will be like any other journey starting with one step at a time. Basically there is nothing to lose but much to gain.
The battery voltage on the actual battery being different from the schematic may be just discharged vs charged voltages. Sounds like a HV 3s battery.
It would have been nice to know what type of power surge you were having to deal with since it would have given you a better picture of what you might have been facing but this is just the breaks sometimes most people don't even think of what may have surged the line.... my experience is a direct strike is pretty much a futile repair attempt, a brush where you were close to the strike like lighting not striking the power line directly but close enough to induce a high voltage on the line or you are further down the line from the strike... sometimes you may fix it. and this is the area that a good surge protector can help protect you. Or the power company drops a 220 line on your 110 and I have personally had that happen odds are much more in your favor to repair it... and then you can have a Brown out and sometimes that can fry you electronics as well and odds are pretty much in your favor to repair it... all was ask if you can, but buying on eBay your often left in uncharted territory.
Sometimes it's good to know when let it go in order to not cause any more damage but I believe Steve you would replace that last chip successfully without any BGA Station :D
I love your videos Steve keep up the good work
Glad you like them!
I don't know if that laptop has a battery or not. But I would disconnect it if I were you, Steve. I have learned this the expensive way by having to repair an LVDS screen cable, and the LCD power supply circuit. And in the end if it is not fixable, send it to Northridge Fix. Alex does work on small BGA chips.
Tough luck Steve next time.nice video
I can’t wait for a part 2
Send this laptop to the The Cod3r as a repair challenge. Locking tab are easy to replace from one connector to another. In your case the locking metal side plates form the outside hinge and needs to be bent a little outside to free the plastic pins.
You do if the connector itself is broken
Watching this on my own m15xr4 laptop. I'll takes notes for the future, lol.
always measure 5V and 3.3V on coils. if they are present, laptop should turn on. or at least LEDs should show something. if not, bios may be dead - reflashing will fix issue.
That white component near the internal connector looks like a fuse. Did you check whether that fuse was popped?
Wonder if the power surge board could be used to repair the donor board, depending on its problem?
Hi! Maybe I missed, but did you check 5v rail for for a short?
lithium ion batteries are often shown at their median voltage, not their max voltage. that battery is a 3p battery. 3x4.2 max voltage is 12.6. Median is 3x3.7 is 11.1v
This is a HV battery. 11.4V = 3.8 x 3. The max charge for that battery should be 13.05V. It will say somewhere in the battery, it can also be 13.20V
On the battery they mean the nominal voltage of 3.8V * 3 cells (11.4V), fully charged would be 4.2 * 3 (12.6V)
Also many laptops use what they call LiHV cells that are regular Lithium cells with chemistries to increase service life when charged to 4.4V/cell with a total of 13.2V...
Though I'm charging a modded phone battery moto-mod attachment where I use a 4.2V cell at 4.35V and researching let me know that the 4.4v is an upper-limit thing that gives more capacity with reducing capacity by a third (200 cycles versus 300 cycles service life).
Most laptops that have LiHV cells seems to report a 12.9v peak charging when polling the device directly (Something Linux allows in most cases, except peasant-grade HP laptops et least)
It seems that they choose 4.3v/cell for some safety margin and to give a few more cycles service life. It also explains part of why laptop batteries from 2008 can often still give 80% its design capacity and yet a battery from laptops of the 2016 and newer often don't hold charge well or swell up.
@@dedr4m Oh interesting, never heard of LiHV before
Glad u learning.
I think the chip replaced creates 2 voltages output. 3.5V (3v5). 5V. Typically the enable lines should have around 3v. Not sure if they are all enable high or enable low (en_l).
Oh, man i was really hoping you get it fixed 😩
Me too!
Even if you could buy the chip, there's no way you could also program it with the required code. It looked like some kind of micro. So a donor board was the only possibility to fix it.
Yep
SPOILER ALERT
@@commanderkeen3787 Too late for that!!!
But that's a very small chip. I'm almost a complete beginner and was still able to reball a chip of roughly that same size using a 5 dollar kit from Aliexpress. The chip I reballed was an ARM from a JDM-040 PS4 controller board. It took only 30 minutes and one failed attempt because I burned a chip from a practice board at 480ºC (the right amount of heat was 270ºC with low melt solder balls and a universal stencil from the reballing kit).
Maybe you aren't an expert with laptops, but you are a master applying the perfect amount of thermal paste on any device ;3
Why haven't check the board current absorbing with an inject voltage tool? The with a termal camera you could diagnose it very fast
That PL501 coil looks very discoloured on top edge..Did you not try it?
for last step can inject 5v to rail with low amp
great class.... sorry for the laptop.....
💯
The enable signal is disabled when below 0.5v and turned on above 1.5v.
Checked the datasheet and compared to others from the manufacturer.
So something is pulling the output down and tripping the over current protection.
Or the reference is bad
a li-po 3s battery fully charged has 12.6 volts and avg 11.4 so schematic and labeling were right
😢 anyway you did a lot, respect to your work!
Thanks!
Nice Steve 😃
Ahah, looks like I'm not the only one using the S technique when applying thermal paste !
I wish you could have fixed that laptop that would have been so cool to see working
I know, right?!
I like the videos where you also show for how much you can sell it.
I spit out my coffee on the perfect thermal paste glow and music!
Lol!
I'm a proper pansy when it comes to electricity. How often do you get something like this where you plug it in and it just goes "POW!" immediately?
Awesome try✌🏻✌🏻✌🏻✌🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Interesting, I though PSU would protect against power serges, is it now??
Plugging in and waiting for explosion suddenly remembers me electroboom😂
Ha, ha, his channel is great!
@@Tronicsfix you too bro as an electronics lover I'm studying new things from both channels huge respect for both of you guys🥰
if you buy a chip to replace it it will be preballed so you could try and replace it with hot air, you don't need to reball anything, you can do it, i believe in you😁
We miss that perfect amount of thermal paste rays 😂
It was a good race, it's sad to see that it's not possible to fix it. But it was really interesting to see the complexity of boards like this.
Yes, such a bummer
You don't need a BGA station to replace that chip. I hate to see you give up when you've come so far.
Well you'll be a laptop expert soon enough when you try to repair more and more in the future
Aw, that ending felt like what was coming but I hoped you'd get lucky. Good try Steve!
I was hoping I'd be able to fix this one to, but alas
What can break the solder balls on a BGA chip? Would that be from a drop/fall?
Yes, that can definitely cause it
very cool video
Did you really do chip swaps on the power areas of a mobo with the battery still installed?
6:14 This is what we are all here for. You too, don't you dare to deny it.
Fireworks 😭 but nice work 😎
Were there no fuses on the incoming power?
It seems that many manufacturers don't bother with fuses anymore.
@@Tronicsfix Speaks volumes for the necessity of a good surge suppressor then.
Edit: they make those small single plug ones now, so it's easy peasy to have one on hand.
stupid question, but can you just insert 5v to tthat chip?
Ahhh a nice long video trying to problem solve. More more… 👍🏽
Said it before and will say it again, I do not understand why in the US, people pay so much for what is sold as "spares or repair". There is zero guarantee these things are fixable, and like with this board, even re-selling for spares is gonna be tough as you have no idea what is still useable other than the most obvious things that are not electrical.
Here in the UK, you would take a risk at £100 maybe, but no way would you spend £300 on a spares or repair item, even if it's potential value is £700.
It's like a form of gambling.
Wow, if I had an expensive laptop like that it’d be on a surge protected extension cord.
Bro you have a bridge pch damage you must change it and programming him mr region
That really sucks you wasn't able to get it fixed
locate de 5v rail and inject voltage
Once repair where can I buy 🤔
I think it's time to buy a reballing machine !
Aren't the power bricks supposed to save laptops from power surge ??? If no then what's the benefit 😩this makes me scared to play games while plugged in to wall though power cuts are rare in my area
It helps them, accidentally plugged my xbox one into a 220V wall plug, the power brick smoked and popped a bit. Xbox one is safe. still it may sometimes be faulty and just let the charge pass.
Most of the time they will save the device but it isn't 100%. While 99% of the time the brick is what gets killed there is a good 1% chance it gets through to the other components. It also is commonly an age issue, older power bricks are more likely to fail. That 1% change is why I have all my high dollar stuff like TV, game console, PC all plugged into a UPS. They prevent both the low power and power surge from killing anything.
It's always best to have everything plugged into a surge protector
The PSU is supposed to have built in surge suppression unless it's a cheap knockoff, however the output of the PSU has no surge suppression, it's what those MOSFETS are partially for and the fact the typical input capacitances are around 220uF max thus a surge of less than a few miliseconds at maybe 10+ amps (the power brick will have over 2200uF of bulk capacitance for smoothing power to the typical 19V, edit: That means the capacitors will handle and smooth the millisecond surges well in excess of at least twice the rated max current as that's the max continuous current of the power supply)
The mains surge is always isolated from the laptop unless the knockoff has no insulation tape between the mains and laptop side (See Diode Gone Wild and his videos on dodgy chargers).
That is, if the PSU can supply 12A continuous and the laptop is rated to pull no more than 4.35A (assuming all the USB is in use, a power hungry HDD, max RAM and running a stress test), should the laptop have a fault that draws more than 4.35A max, say 10A.... whatever is causing that will have 5.65A going through it until something gives, be it the component at fault, a fuse, an active safety current limiting sense circuit trips shutting off the damaged part or the whole laptop (i.e. a faulty GPU could either turn off or the whole laptop turns off, the manufacturer decides).
Lesson:
Be very careful to get a genuine original power supply or one that is reputable and is of a known genuine source, there's plenty of knock-offs that look genuine (again, see Diode Gone Wild's videos, many look genuine and yet almost guaranteed to kill the unsuspecting user because the "safe side" is essentially shorted to mains!!!).
Also, things do sometimes just fail, I had a laptop hinge cut into the display cable shorting 19V to the backlight enable wire killing the Embedded Controller and thus wrote the whole laptop off (The BGA part that is suspected in this video, could be a similar cause)
@@Tronicsfix Only reason why I have almost everything plugged into a voltage transformer set at 110v so that nothing would blow up again.
Reply to 13:55. As far as I know, there is not a single modern laptop which requires a battery to run. Power cable should be just fine.
Actually, many batteries go bad over time, and require you to either unplug it, or replace it if you want good performance on your laptop.
Since whenever the battery is low, your computer will most likely attempt to preserve the power longer by not using as much power on the cpu and gpu.
Leaving you with a worse performance overall. Batteries going bad looks simular to regular low battery to the operating system.
I personally had an issue with my laptop, where it kept trying to use battery settings even though it showed as fully charged.
So I ended up unplugging mine and only ever using the cable to avoid the performance hickups.
Nice try man! You sure went the extra mile trying to fix it. At least you have some spare parts for future repair videos.
I would have made an S with the thermal paste for Steve! ha-ha!
you should try and fix a Xbox 360 you can get the scimitars for them online
Damn that Flir thing is expensive isn't it !
Depends on your definition of expensive. I think they're around $100-$200. I don't remember for sure
well it is for me my friend :-) but a nice little unit , nevermind on the alienware , next time fella !
the battery was still pluged in it is a huge risk for the mainboard
Best repair for an Alienware laptop: pull out anything that you could reuse in a better system and send the rest to the land fill.
I think you need a 3d printer to make your own replacement plastic parts. lol
Steam Deck will support fixing their device 👍🏻
Yep, I love that they do that. If only the larger manufacturers would do that too
@@Tronicsfix can’t wait to see you try one!
I think the problem is - you fixed the mosfet . but you will also have put it into security mode... frozen bios ... it will act like macbooks and just lock out. replace the bios chip... then u should see it come back to life :)
i thought the t-shirt gave him the power :(
Ha, ha, I wish!
i thonk the 3v3 rail was simply shorted because it was absolutley 0
i wrote a comment, but its gone now, hopefully you got a chance to see it, hope it helps!
Strange, I don't see it anywhere. I even check the held for review section.
@@Tronicsfix im not sure why it didn't post, i wrote like a whole paragraph LOL
Anyway basically i said this:
I have worked on this same motherboard before.
on the CPU/GPU side of the board, check all the large main coils (all of them) for continuity to GND.
Also i may have missed you doing this, but I'm not sure.. check the output of the chip you changed for continuity to GND.
Im curious if the reason theres no output is because theres a short on that rail.
The laptop i had came into my shop and ended up having a short on one of the coils near where you were working, 0.7ohms resistance to GND.
when i injected voltage at that coil, a cap lit up on my thermal cam. sort of near the area but near what looks to be the firmware chip, there are two caps next to it. After removing the cap, the laptop came back to life.
i posted a link in my comment to a google review for my business showing the laptop i worked on.
im guessing that may have been the reason youtube pulled my comment, or i just hit "reply" and exited too quick, haha
if you search CF Micro Repairs on google, youll find my business and the first review is the same laptop, but in white.
also, the video was very well done and kept me hooked the entire time, hats off to you steve!
I hope any of this info helps for this or future repairs
Send to Phil