Resurrecting a died Toshiba's A200-ST2.

My sister's A200-ST2 died a couple months ago.
It had only been in use for a little more than a year when it died. Since its international warranty was due and we live in Brazil, I told her that I could check what happened before trying their support here.

The notebook did not show any signs of life when the power button was pressed. All leds were off and no indication of the system being powered.

After having not found anything wrong with the power supply, I started a visual inspection on the mother board to check for signs of anything burned , specially around the power supply circuitry. For my surprise, everything seemed fine. No signs of damage nor damaged components such as the SMD fuses.

The next step I took was to detach all possible pieces of hardware to see what could happen. After detaching the video board and applying the power supply, The computer showed signs of life. I could see the sequence of leds indicating that the system was booting up and afterwards the blips indicating the missing video car.

- AC Led on indicating that the notebook was connected to the outlet -


- Power led on indicating that the power/supervisory circutry was ok and the system is booting -


- Power led blinking in orange indicating the lack of the video card -


- Battery led indicating the battery charging -


- Battery charged -


Since I bought this laptop while I was in Montreal, its repair is likely to be very costly due to the fact that spares parts need to be imported by Toshiba's service center so I decided to go further before spending to much money on its recovery.
After checking visually the video card and not finding any signs of damage, I found, with the aid of a multimeter, that the resistance between the board's power terminals was to low indicating a short circuit which was the cause of it was not being powered up.

I found a spare part on a canadian website for ~U$ 350,00 which is almost half of the price tag when I bought it.
So I kept seeking the cause of the short circuit and after having unsoldered several passive smd components I found two shorted smd capacitors lbeled as PC1 and PC2.
I presume they are used for decoupling switching noise on the board's power bus.

- Detail of the video board -


I replaced them for two 100nf capacitors , assuming tha would be the best value, since I didn't have the board schematics and luckily after reassembling everything up It worked.

It has been up for two weeks now. I hope this post may help anyone with the same problem and it is good to emphasize that a smd capacitor costs cents of dollar .





Regards,

AMSJBR

 

This post was very usefull, +rep

 

Very nice work....and it leads me to ask a question. You refer to the lights on the front panel indicating status. When having a problem with a laptop, will the lights blink out a condition code like the post codes on a desktop system? If so, are they standard from vendor to vendor? Are they plublished somewhere on the net?