Chris Miller
10-10-2015, 08:39 PM
My laptop decided to kick the bucket today. It got to where it would turn on, run for anywhere between two to thirty seconds, and immediately turn off. After some swearing, diagnostic testing, swearing, simplifying the configuration by removing stuff, swearing, nothing much changed. Then I noticed that it would stay on longer without the keyboard hooked up. It even got halfway through booting up a linux flash drive. So I figured maybe something was shorting the keyboard port on the motherboard and tripping the power-off command or something. I couldn't find anything immediately obvious on the board, unfortunately.
Then I turned it over and happened to pop open the cover to the docking station port...and there was an unbelievable amount of corrosion inside. I yanked all the plastic pieces out from around the port, scraped all the crud out, and vacuumed it so it wouldn't get into the system. Couldn't find my rubbing alcohol, so I ended up cleaning it with whiskey, which worked pretty well. The pins on the port disintegrated as I cleaned them, so this thing will never see a docking station, no great loss really. For the life of me, I can't figure out why it happened. Nothing else on the board was even slightly off.
So far, it hasn't cut off in the last twenty minutes. Got my fingers crossed.
Then I turned it over and happened to pop open the cover to the docking station port...and there was an unbelievable amount of corrosion inside. I yanked all the plastic pieces out from around the port, scraped all the crud out, and vacuumed it so it wouldn't get into the system. Couldn't find my rubbing alcohol, so I ended up cleaning it with whiskey, which worked pretty well. The pins on the port disintegrated as I cleaned them, so this thing will never see a docking station, no great loss really. For the life of me, I can't figure out why it happened. Nothing else on the board was even slightly off.
So far, it hasn't cut off in the last twenty minutes. Got my fingers crossed.