Success! Compaq 2500 DC JACK operation!

Well. My stepfather has a Compaq 2500 (presario?) with a P4 2.53 cpu. Earlier this year, the dc cord was accidentally jerked out of it by someone moving the unit from it's normal resting place. This put stress onto the DC JACK in the rear of the unit and caused the cheap plastic in the DC JACK to break thus rendering the unit useless.

The unit was purchased at an online retailer selling refurb units. Extended warranties were of no use on this issue since they deemed the damage to be 'abuse'. They offered to repair the unit for $400 saying the motherboard was busted.

I've had my fair share of experience building 100's of desktop systems (non-apple based) and hated to see this semi-decent laptop sitting in a closet while it's shelf-life (pardon the pun) flys away like beer at a frat party.

Some research led me to Ebay where I purchased a new DC JACK for the unit for $10 or so with shipping incl. . While waiting for the Jack to arrive in the mail, I took the unit apart and removed the motherboard so it could be ready when the part arrived.

I noticed the DC JACK's soldering joints were a little more meticulous than I cared to mess with. The DC JACK took almost 2 weeks to arrive but when they did, I rushed the motherboard and new DC JACK off to my local electronics mom-pop repair shop.

They soldered the new jack on for $10 and I had the unit back together in a matter of about 20-30 minutes.

After saying a prayer (and I'm not a religious man), I located the DC power pack and plugged it in.

I must say, that was the FIRST TIME I was happy to see XP HOME!!!

Only problem, I have a couple of screws left over from the rebuild. Yeah, I'm gonna remove the top of the case this weekend and figure out where they go.

My advice : when you disassemble the unit, either make a video tape or write down the order in which you remove items and list the screws used... etc. I used a weekly pill box and labled each day "motherboard", "chassis bottom", etc etc and still was like "uh... hmmm.... don't see where these babies go!"

So... to those of you who are pondering the $180 offers on ebay or other websites to perform this repair, DON'T DO IT if you have any sort of pc building experience or mechanical dexterity whatsoever.

Send the wife and kids to the mall and put on some good music, pour some ice tea and work in a well-lit workspace. Then, put that saved money into some memory upgrades or a laptop cooler cos this baby runs a little warm!

When I go to put those screws back in (the ones I had left over) I plan to stick on some arctic silver 5 on the CPU. Didn't do that this round. Was more interested in getting it working first before I became anal retentive about it.

Good luck and message me if you need any assistance.

 

Congrats! and nice job.

I also built several Desktops( in 100s), but I am little nervous with lappies, because it is not standard case like desktops and while opening chassis we could potentially break of plastic tabs many places since we does not know exactly how to separate the pieces. Ofcourse I would not spend $200 for the repair though!