My Opera
Gdium surgery
Thursday, December 8, 2011 4:08:40 PM
A while ago my Gdium's power connector got bad - it would only make contact when pulled in a certain way and even then it was flaky at best so I finally decided to open the thing and see if I can fix it.
Laptops, especially small ones, are notoriously difficult to take apart and often it's hard to tell if whatever is holding parts together is a screw you didn't find or some plastic tab you need to ( really, really carefully ) pry open - in other words, wether to apply force or not, if so how much force - therefore it is always a good idea to check if someone else had the problem before you did. Three seconds with google brought up this. It's straight forward, the only difference is that in my Gdium there was no sticky tape to hold the keyboard in place, just plastic tabs.
To my surprise the Gdium - as far as laptops go - is fairly easy to do surgery on. Not a lot of tape, glue and plastic tabs. Many screws, not too many different ones and it's easy to tell which goes where. All screws have metal counterparts embedded in the case, not a single one of those wood screw like things screwed directly into the plastic which serve only one purpose - to wear out on first contact. Manufacturing quality is a lot better than I expected and there are no funky tricks like that tiny but strong magnet that holds the keyboard down in the iBook G4. The only thing that's difficult is the fact that some cables are very thin ( like the ones that go to the buttons and the USB camera in the lid ) so you have to be careful there.
But back to the power connector problem. Turns out the connector was fine, just a bad soldering pad which was easy enough to fix. The connector is a nondescript barrel type, mounted SMD-style instead of having the pins poke through the mainboard, and there is nothing else holding it in place so be careful if you want to avoid having to open your Gdium.
Laptops, especially small ones, are notoriously difficult to take apart and often it's hard to tell if whatever is holding parts together is a screw you didn't find or some plastic tab you need to ( really, really carefully ) pry open - in other words, wether to apply force or not, if so how much force - therefore it is always a good idea to check if someone else had the problem before you did. Three seconds with google brought up this. It's straight forward, the only difference is that in my Gdium there was no sticky tape to hold the keyboard in place, just plastic tabs.
To my surprise the Gdium - as far as laptops go - is fairly easy to do surgery on. Not a lot of tape, glue and plastic tabs. Many screws, not too many different ones and it's easy to tell which goes where. All screws have metal counterparts embedded in the case, not a single one of those wood screw like things screwed directly into the plastic which serve only one purpose - to wear out on first contact. Manufacturing quality is a lot better than I expected and there are no funky tricks like that tiny but strong magnet that holds the keyboard down in the iBook G4. The only thing that's difficult is the fact that some cables are very thin ( like the ones that go to the buttons and the USB camera in the lid ) so you have to be careful there.
But back to the power connector problem. Turns out the connector was fine, just a bad soldering pad which was easy enough to fix. The connector is a nondescript barrel type, mounted SMD-style instead of having the pins poke through the mainboard, and there is nothing else holding it in place so be careful if you want to avoid having to open your Gdium.
