Near death experience, plus info for 5935g through to 5943g users.

Ok few, Road Warrior almost bit the dust, HARD.

For those of you not with 5935 -> 5943 machines you can skip to the ---- line.

As a few of you know (Tehsuigi in particular) I have been trying to get a high res panel working on my machine.

After much exploring I have found out only the following models from acer use the same connector:

5935
5940
5942
5943

Now the bummer is that all these models only have the single channel LVDS cables since they only have low res displays.

The good news is both the connector and the board support dual LVDS. The bad bad news is that the connectors are fidly as hell.

Anyway I have been moving forward and bought myself a soldering iron and some accessories in an attempt to connect wires from another cable. My smallest tip atm is 0.5mm which looks like trying to paint a vase while wearing boxing gloves so I have a 0.13mm tip on the way.

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So what has this got to do with my laptop burning?

Well I realised that my graphics switch button has not been working, I assumed it was the Nvidia card I was using was not compatable but actually the cable had sat awkwardly over a screw hole and got done in by it, but due to the horrible insulation tape it was hard to tell.

After a quick check with the multimeter I confirmed 3 of the 4 pins were disconnected.

Armed with my new soldering iron I snipped the two ends clean and resoldered each wire, carefully wrapping each connection in electrical tape and then all of them in more tape I thought I was safe when I put it all toghether and it worked as normal.

WRONG.

The cable was damaged but still making a connection around the battery charger area (can you tell where this is going?) About an hour ago I was browsing the web and noticed that my battery indicator said no battery connected (it was).

I thought this meant the battery was dead, I have a 3rd party battery, I had tried a couple of other OEMs off ebay but they died fast, this one (a large capacity version) has been going a couple of months now.

So I took the laptop through to the livingroom and happened to brush the power saver button and the battery charger lit up. So I turned the computer on and pressed the button again and the entire machine shut off.

Taking the machine apart I discovered that not only was the cable damaged but one of the wires mostly does not exist any more, the pattern of the insulartion tape is burned into the casing and most of the original insulation on all the others is missing too.

Remarkably after removing the cable and turning on the machine the battery is fine and responding as normal and there is no other obvious damage (yet).