With this ring, this silver hoop of wire, I bind your maiden mainstem just to keep you as a child.

[reddragdiva]

Note: I am barely reading LJ of late. If you post something important or, alternately, something saying "tick this now or you're sooo off my list," I probably won't see it unless you email me or comment on a post of mine.

Tonight I am looking after an unwell redcountess (who has just changed medications, so it should be a fun few days) and taking the laptop apart at last. May I say how shockingly nice Compaqs are to work on, particularly after a Thinkpad 560X. (Which I must send a keyboard or at least keys for to tamaranth before I get a surface-to-air nudge.) The manual only lied once (about which side the external battery connector is on).

And I think I've found the problem: a surface-mounted component, could be a power conditioning coil or something, which has come unstuck.

The white space with solder pads is where the component was, the black circle-in-square above is the component in question upside down, the copper pads on the black circle-in-square are what came unstuck from the solder pads, and the black circle-in-square left of the white space is the displaced component's twin. The white space is about 10×10mm. The camera does many things adequately, but close-ups aren't amongst them, macro setting or no.

I'm not really sure what it is (the service manual on the site doesn't include a full system board schematic) and I have NO IDEA how safe just resoldering it would be. Can anyone advise me on the wisdom of doing so?

I'm also slowly getting through the Whitby New Year photos (shots added to Wednesday-Friday and Sunday), including an MPEG of SNOW!!! outside Peterborough. Note, by the way, that all your direct links to individual images on these albums will no longer work as their positions in each album change. So there.

My problems getting my camera to talk to Linux or FreeBSD (or, as I discovered, Solaris 9 on a V210) appear to be because it was made on a Friday or something — arkady's of the same model works perfectly with her Thinkpad A30 and mine doesn't. How annoying. Though it still talks to all Macs or Windows boxes I've tried it on.

Comments

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

Depends how steady your hands are. Personally, I'd pay one of the guys at the computer fair to do it.

[reddragdiva]

I can do steadiness, it's (b) how susceptible to heat damage the component and board are (a) what the hell it actually is ...

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

surface mount soldering is a bit of a black art. Never tried it myself. I had a conversation with syncretin about it and he described many odd techniques (such as people who do it by carefully heating up the whole board at once with an electric frying pan with a customised hi precision thermostat), he has built a few SMD hobbyist projects. Not sure what the preferred technique for spot repairs is, I could ask.

If it is a coil, they aren't particularly sensitive to heat damage.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

The manual only lied once (about which side the external battery connector is on).

No, no, that's just a left/right-side drive error.

(Says the man who's deciphered Haynes automobile manuals for non-US cars in the US too many times.)

FIRE TWO!

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

Can anyone advise me on the wisdom of doing so?

Does the laptop work right now?

Assuming "no"... what's to lose?

Re: FIRE TWO!

[reddragdiva]

Yes, that's an important point ;-)

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Many, many years ago (we're talking back when I was doing GCSE Technology here, when that meant actually soldering stuff and building pneumatic circuits instead of poncing around with computers), I remember doing some very fiddly work with surface-mounted components and doing spot-repairs with an electroconductive fixative. It was like a sort of heatless solder in glue form. I'm sure you could probably get it in Maplins.

[reddragdiva]

That sounds like just the stuff! :-D

[reddragdiva]

Of course, if that's actually a power component (it looks like it might be, it's got large electrodes and it's right next to the processor, which is the big square at top right), solder having much lower resistance might be important ... I'll investigate further.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Which I must send a keyboard or at least keys for to [info]tamaranth before I get a surface-to-air nudge.)

You really aren't paying any attention to LJ, are you?!

new keyboard fitted: couldn't live without -> and L any longer!

[kest]

that's ok, I'm barely reading you. :P

(I got behind a few months back and I'm only reliably caught up through the 'm's so if your lj name starts with a letter after m, I'm mostly skipping entries until I have time to go back and read everything you've written.)