My laptop has finally stopped working for me after 4 years. I doesn’t even turn on or attempt to, or show that it is plugged in. It does try to use the battery, but it just flashes an amber dead battery light when I attempt to turn it on with the battery in, since the plug won’t work, the battery is dead.
Anyway, I have heard before that Dell power jacks are really shitty and they always break. I took my XPS 1210 apart and looked at the power jack. It isn’t loose or anything, and all the solder connections look fine. I could understand it breaking by a soldier connection seperating or something. But otherwise, how is it these things actually break? I seems like it is just something that receives a plug. What the hell is there to break?
Is it because the connectors inside get stretched out and it no longer connects to the plug? Is there anything I can do to jury rig something so that I can use my computer for the next couple weeks?
I am even willing to cut my power cord and solder parts of it directly to the mother board if someone will explain to me what wire goes where.
Summary:
What causes a Dell power jack to stop working besides the solder joints breaking or coming loose?
What temporary fix can I attempt on this power jack to make it work?
What else could the issue be on my computer if it isn’t a faulty power jack?
contacts in the jack or the AC adapter plug barrel could be spreading.
though I read your post a few times and didn’t see that you’ve tried a different power supply. have you?
anyway, the real shitty Dell power jacks were the miserable 3-pin things from like 10 years ago, the design on the XPS M1210 isn’t any worse than others. And the solder joints on the mainboard can be cracked without the damage being visible to the eye. you could try taking an iron to the solder points on the mainboard and reflowing the solder to see if that helps.
I haven’t tried a new power jack yet. I found one online for under twenty bucks, but being in Afghanistan, and at the end of my tour, it wouldn’t make it to me before I leave here. I will have to order one when I get back to Italy.
Since you’ve said that the solder points could be fucked up without the thing actually feeling loose or otherwise being noticeable, I am going to go ahead and resolder this one and see if it helps.
Main problem, (other than not having internet/computer access in my hooch now) is that I have files on there I need to get at in the meantime. Nobody here has an IDE->USB adapter or anything like that.
So I am wondering how successful will I be if I tried to swap this hard drive with one from a Dell Latitude laptop. I know there will be driver issues, but will the latitude boot with the hard drive from my XPS and at least let me get some files off there? Obvious answer is “try it and see”, but before I go fucking with the government computers and throwing my hard drive in one of them, I would like to see if anyone else has knowledge or experience with something similar.
Oh, and I did try a couple other Dell power cords. None of them worked so the issue is something in the computer itself. Either the power jack or something on the board itself somewhere.
Have you checked your power supply with a voltmeter to see if it supplies a voltage? My original AC adapter for my laptop went out on me. No voltage when I checked with a voltmeter. I now think it went out because the wires that went to the laptop became exposed right at the brick, and shorted. The flexing of the cable at the brick caused the problem.
I bought a replacement, and that one seemed even more cheaply made, and started to look like it was going to wear out also. I managed to wire in the old cable to the new brick, and I’m trying to be careful not to bend the cable much at the brick, or at the other end where it plugs into the laptop.
As far as accessing files on the old drive, you could burn a Live CD from your favorite OS, boot from it, and transfer the files from the drive to a USB drive or flashdrive.
I don’t know if your Dell has a round power jack or some odd shape with several pin connectors. If it is the pin type connector, what happens is that one of the pins gets pushed back into the computer side and never contacts the plug when pushed in. What I did on mine is carefully reach in with tiny needle nosed pliers and pull that pin out gently. It had enough tension to allow the jack to be inserted one time. I glued it in at that point and fastened the cord to the back of the PC with enough slack so that the power cord would never get pulled out again.
The “pin-out” diagram for the jack was posted on the Internet. You’ll have to Google for yours. If you got far enough to the circuit board to work on the jack, you could certainly solder wires directly to the board.
If the Dell is anything like some old Apple designs, it IS solder joints cracking that cause this problem. The connector gets a lot of stress due to the torque of the cable. This eventually leads to the solder connections failing. You can open up the machine and confirm this, and if so, just re-solder. Also, power cables often fail right at the connector due to the wires breaking from repeated flexing.
A few things
1: Check the power adapter. Notebook power adapters die like flies. Get a voltage multi tester from a tech and set it in a range that can show 15-20 volts DC. If the multi tester needle is too fat to go inside the coaxial power adapter tube use a straightened paperclip to make the inside connection. One needle on the outer sleeve of the connection and on on the inside. The inside contact will be positive + and the outside sleeve contact will be negative -.
2: Check the battery integrity
Modern notebook batteries typically last about 2 -3 years or so. At 4 years your battery pack is quite possibly on it’s last legs and will not take a charge.
Having said all this in looking online this appears to be a chronic issue with Dell XPS models similar to yours and is not related to a weak power jack, but deeper motherboard related hardware issues.
If this is really the case I would just dump the Dell and move on.
Re recovering files if you put the drive in new notebook windows will try to boot and will find it does not have many of the hardware drivers it needs. It may succeed and give you an ugly boot (it’ll look like safe mode) or it may have a heart attack if it does not have some mission critical drivers, however, usually it will boot. If it does you can pull your files to a thumb drive.
Double check, but I believe your drive is a 2.5" SATA IDE drive so make sure the notebook you try this with uses an SATA connector not an older IDE connector. Do go just by eyeballing it as many notebooks use a removable drive caddy and the caddy connector interface to the motherboard (designed for quick install-removal) looks nothing like the drive pins. You need to remove the drive from the caddy to eyeball it.
You can’t 'hurt" the govt notebook computer doing this unless you accidentally break some hardware in the install process. If you’ve removed the govt notebook drive it remains untouched by your munging around with your drive.
To maximize your chances of recovery I would really just wait until you get an external notebook SATA drive case and go that route. It’s safer than hoping the OS recalibration goes well enough fo it to boot and allow file access by sticking it in another notebook. Having said this the chances are fairly good it will boot (eventually) in a new notebook . It will probably require several re-starts.
In viewing this imageit appears your power jack is not a standard barrel but it has a center pin. In this case just measure off the center pin for positive + and the external barrel for negative - . If you get no response try reversing the leads. Still no response the PS is likely dead which is a good thing as it the least expensive fix. Make sure the PS cable has no breaks or cuts or broken strain reliefs where the cable enters the PS housing.
The spec for your PS is 19.5 volts DC.
As a temporary emergency fix If it’s just your PS transformer that’s dead and you can get a spare govt notebook PS that’s at least 15 to 20 volts (but not more) DC and 3+ amps and splice your Dell PS connector cable to it (mind the polarity) and it should work temporarily, watch the adapter to make sure it does not overheat. If the Dell battery pack has some sort of under-voltage detection circuit that refuses to use PS source less than 19.5 volts obviously this will not work with a 15 VDC supply.
This issue is not the power supply. I have tried several known working power supplies and none of them work. My power supply will work in other computers with no issue.
The battery is shit, I’m sure. But that should have nothing to do with the fact that the computer is not getting power from the DC jack. If there is no battery plugged in, then nothing at all happens when I try to turn the computer on. If I plug in the battery, at least it will flash an amber dead battery light when I try to turn it on. Plugging in the power supply does nothing at all.
I do have the barrell type with a pin in the center. If the center is positive and the outer barrel negative, then what is the inner barrell? Ground?
I have already finished cutting the end off my power cord. I now have three wires–what used to be the pin, inner, and outer barrel. Can someone tell me where to solder each of these three wires? It is not immediate obvious from looking at the power jack. I can tell which is the middle, but can’t tell the inner and outer connectors. Anyone know or have a diagram?
Also, I have an idea that I think would be easier. There are like 10 blade type connectors in the back of the laptop that connect to the battery. Would it be possible to just solder the three wires from my power supply directly onto three of these battery terminals? Would that work if I knew which three connectors to use? Anyone have a diagram of these connections? They are bigger, so I would think that this would be easier to mess with if the idea is feasable.
Use an ohmmeter (continuity tester) to determine how the power plug is wired. If you don’t have one, use an X-acto knife to carve away the plastic over-molding and figure out which wires go where.
I know how the power plug is wired. As I said, I’ve already cut the end off of it and stripped it down to the three wires. I know where the wires went in the plug.
What I don’t know is where the wires would connect directly to the mother board. I can’t tell by looking at the power jack which pin is the outer portion of the barrel and which is the inner. Since I can’t tell by looking at the power jack, I don’t know which wires from the power plug to solder onto which part of the motherboard. Sure it is a 50/50 guess, but then I might fry something if I’m wrong.
FWIW most of the online discussions about the XPS 1210 battery not charging issues seem to point to a problem with motherboard charging circuit, not the physical integrity of the jack connection to the motherboard. IN my experience if it’s really a jack connection issue gently wiggling the power plug around while it’s seated into the jack attached will usually get some intermittent charging light activating, if only briefly.
Actually, it’s pretty hard to solder connections to the motherboard without either overheating other parts on the board, or damaging other solder joints on the motherboard (making them intermittent).
My brother had a similar problem with his Dell XPS laptop. A good, honest computer repair shop told him of the soldering problem. They said they had a specialist who can solder on the motherboard, but it costs $150, whether it works or not. (Given the age & value of his laptop, he chose not to do this.)
You would think that. But all I can see are the outside pins, so I can’t make out which pin touches the outer barrel connectors and which touches the inner. Almost positive the middle pin is the center wire connector cause that only makes sense.
But anyway, I resoldered the jack, and there is no improvement. I am sure something on the board is fried. Oh well, I can tough it out for a month using the community computers.
I went ahead and pulled out all the good stuff from my old laptop and then trashed it. Going to just try to buy the exact same model on ebay for a couple hundred dollars. Most of the ones on ebay have the 1.8ghz chip and just a little bit of RAM. I have the 2.16 core duo and 4GB of Ram, so I kept those to just swap out in the refurb computer I buy from eBay.
One thing I wasn’t sure if I should keep or not is the cooling unit. Would both chips use the same cooling unit, or does my laptop have one specifically for the faster chip? I kept it just in case, but maybe someone could tell me.
I do this sort of repair all the time, and I usually use my cheap temp-controlled iron, which is standard equipment for any board-level repair. Now, if all you have ever soldered is plumbing or stained glass, then yes, you will probably ruin the board, but any competent electronics repair guy should be able to solder to a motherboard.
The center pin is a data signal wire that tells the BIOS what type of charger it is. The chip in the charger that generates this data is notorious for failing and making the charger not function.
