Motherboard repair

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Dimwit
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Motherboard repair

Post by Dimwit »

Hi this is my first post in this section. I thought it might be of intrest to someone.
I was recently given an old faulty HP pc that the mouse didn't on, the pointer just stayed in the middle of the screen.
I checked in the device manager and no pointing devices were shown. Did a search on the net and tried a few things but nothing worked.
I thought that maybe the mouse socket itself was faulty. The mouse and keyboard sockets come as one complete assembly. I had a few old motherboards lying around, checked and found the sockets all appear to be standard.
So out came the old soldering iron and I removed the "new" sockets from the donor board, easy enough. Then removed the faulty sockets, not so easy. I managed to pull off one of the solder pads along with some of the finest pcb tracks you have ever seen. Leaving a short strip of very fine track sticking up in the air. To make matters worse it was on top of the pcb under the socket assemly leading to a surface mounted ic, so no chance of soldering a link on, the pads on the ic are way to small.
Here is the socket assembly you can see the solder pad still attatched to one one the pins
100_1373 (Custom).JPG
100_1373 (Custom).JPG (49.61 KiB) Viewed 2258 times
Not one to give up that easy I thought I might be able to recover from this.
Soldered on the new sockets then took a small piece of wire from an old floppy drive ribbon cable and soldered it to the pin that had the solder pad missing threaded it through the board and very carefully soldered it the floating piece of track.
Then glued the wire to the case of the sockets to try and stop any strain on the joint.
100_1359 (Custom).JPG
100_1359 (Custom).JPG (71.35 KiB) Viewed 2258 times
Refitted the motherboard and it actually worked, a fully working mouse and keyboard.

Must admit this is not the first time I have carried out a motherboard repair.
When I was swapping cpu's over once, I managed to bend a pin over and when I tried to straighten it off it broke.
So I soldered a flying lead onto the cpu from where the pin had broke off took it over the board and soldered it onto pin of the cpu socket. That actually worked as well.
I have photos of that as well if anyone wants to see.
Maxsys
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by Maxsys »

Why not use a wireless mouse and keyboard, fair play to you but sounds like too much effort for me
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by Sparky James »

usb mouse ....... easy fix
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Dimwit
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by Dimwit »

I thought about the easy fix using an usb mouse but that wouldn't have been a challenge.
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by wine~o »

Dimwit wrote:I thought about the easy fix using an usb mouse but that wouldn't have been a challenge.

Indeed..some people take the easy option...feel proud that you took the difficult route and succeeded(Sp?)
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by tombarry »

Well done, I would have took the easy route for sure
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by Megaross »

Yeah to get my power socket working on my laptop I've done something very similar, motherboard repair is surprisingly easy I think. When you know whats wrong anyway.
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Dimwit
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by Dimwit »

Yes I quiet agree done a couple of motherboard repairs where it has been something really simple like the battery holder or blown capitors. In fact I have done a fair number of repairs on electronic equipment where the fault has been down to capitors espically in the power supply area.
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by Megaross »

Yeah I've done the caps on this laptop I'm using right now, I'm glad I was too skint to replace it, it's still going months later. Just, but it certainly saved binning a perfectly good bit of electronic equipment.
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by warmadmax »

Plenty of motherboards at work started playing up with dodgy cap's

easy to spot them as well, they should have a square top,
soon as they're bulging on top or stuff out the bottom, need to swap em.
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Re: Motherboard repair

Post by Dimwit »

Yes the bulge on top is a dead give away usually the sign of cheap capacitors.
One good example is the power supply in certain sky boxes, just look on ebay for the number of repair kits for sale.
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