TheAndroid

All,
I have a Dell 5150 which correctly detects when I plug in the charger, says it's charging but does not charge the battery (ever, on, off, doesn't matter). I've replaced the battery, but that doesn't help. The indicator lights are on just as they were before. Windows and the BIOS both say the unit is charging, but you can watch the battery meter slowly go down.
I forgot my power supply earlier this week and have been trying others. I suppose one of those burned something up. I've seen a few posts that say this is unrepairable, but not why. Seems like it should be easy enough to fix. I'm not afraid of solder or diving into the case. I'd just like an idea of what I'm up against.

Thanks.

Computer_Doctor

Hi Android,

Hmmm.......since you did plenty of troubleshooting already, the problem could be a bad AC Adapter port. Is the AC adapter port loose? Do you have any warranty with dell on your laptop?

loudnproud59

As in the first post check the power jack on the laptop amd make sure it is not loose if you find that the jack is loose the best thing to do would be to replace the the power jack you can find them on ebay,if your power jack is fine then it will be the charging circiut on the mainboard and repairing the circiut might be impossible since most of the components are surface mount plus you would have a hard time finding new parts,in order for you to remove those surface mount components you would probably need a rework station a soldering iron would not work very well,if you can not repair your mainboard problem then you could find a replacment on ebay, hope this helps let us know what you find.

Dynamite1982

The problem is not the power jack it is an ic on the board. I fix these on a regular basic.
it's very tricky to fix.... because the ic is so small

bobburns

I have a Dell 1150. Bought it used. Someone tried to repair the jack before - and used ACID core solder. I can tell the difference. Close inspection of the circuit traces reveal the traces eaten away at the jack connections.

They then connected the center ground of the jack to the four outer lug grounds of the DC jack, and the end positive trace jumped across with a bridged glob of solder to the surface mount component directly in front of the positive end line of the DC jack where the on board circuit line runs to.

It ran O.K. and charged the battery - but only installed Windows XP (Non-Dell) completely one time, and other times it would fail and blue screen on a 0000000A error or NTFS.sys error. (After I had upgraded the BIOS to A07) When I copied a complete working XP O/S to the drive and booted it that way, (and fixed the config and system32 errors) I got an inaccessible boot device error (missing specialty driver). O.K. I expected that and ordered a Dell XP install CD

When I upgraded the BIOS from version A03 to A07, It went fine. Then I tried to upgrade the processor from a 2.66 to a 3.06 SL7A non HT and replaced the DC jack soldering job at the same time. It wasn't until I got a good look at the traces under magnification that I felt the thing would not likely charge again - because the surface mount component directly in front of the jack looked damaged and lifted from the board.

I put IT BACK LIKE THEY HAD SOLDERED IT and sure enough it would boot, but no video with out a jumper from the on board video ground to the DC jack ground, and it will not charge now.

Is that surface mount component something you can fix? It is the one directly where the positive trace line leads to. (It looks like a surface mount resistor - even the equivalent in a regular carbon resistor would be acceptable)