Anyone else had problems with their ACER and power/battery/charging?

I saw another post moments ago which reminded me of the pain in the ass my acer was. I forget the model number, but once i'm home i will look it up.

Anyway, i bought the laptop used for my mother, so she would have something to browse eBay on. Got it, used it for a bit. All was fine. So i thought anyway.

I noticed that it would not run and charge the battery at the same time, and then it started to not charge at all. I would have to adjust the cable (the end that plugs into the laptop itself) constantly to get power at all, pull it out, twist it, bend it funny ways, etc. etc. It continually got worse.

Eventually it got to the point where she couldn't use the laptop at all, naturally this was frustrating but i wasn't going to heckle the owner, because he may have actually never noticed the problem (i dont think he ever really used it much) so i figured my chances of getting anything out of it were slip, and i didn't want to put a possibly innocent person through stress just so i could find some recourse.

Figuring it was sink or swim i decided i'd tear the laptop apart. What other options did i have? Nothing i did fixed the problem, it only got worse. Eventually after doing a few google searches i found plenty of users in the same position, confused, but no answers.

I took the laptop apart, which much to my delight was actually quite easy compared to a compaq r3240 (or something like that) which suffered from the same problems. I would like to mention, that by this point i had already tested the power supply to make sure that was not the weak link. Anyway, i had the laptop completely taken apart, and much to my delight found that the connections to the board via the female plugin were fried/burnt/shorted whatever. After some very careful work with the snips i detached the adapter, cleaned the leads (they were intact, the pcb wasn't damaged) best i could and headed out to radioshack.

From there it was a somewhat simple fix. Picked up a new female and male connector. Removed the male from the power supply and replaced it with the new unit (there was nothing wrong with it, but the acer used a size that was not stocked, no biggie). The female was not so easy, it had to be connected via wire due to the fact it would not fit the mobo. So i soldered the wire to the mobo and the other end of course to the female connector, put it all back together, epoxied the female connector to the back (this was the easiest solution, it sticks out a bit, but thats fine, its secure, its not going anywhere anyway... if it messes up again, ill simply throw it away, or use it as a carputer, comma comma comma) and it worked good as new.

I am by no means an expert, and was wondering if anyone else had experienced these problems.

 

thats probably whats going to end up being wrong with my acer. I'm lucky it's still under warrenty so I can send it to be repaired but this will be the 4th time in 4 months that I have had to send it for repair. it works on average for about 2 and a half weeks then something else goes out. If I had it to do over again I would not purchase an acer.

 

I would not be surprised if they told you your entire mobo was shot due to this problem.

 

It is a Travelmate 2200, just checked.