Lesson's Learned No. 1

Always take down all the parts you've disassembled, why it is there, how it was put there, just note everything down and never play around too long with ribbon cables.


I just experienced this lesson the hard way, again. I'm trying to format a very old laptop, the Sony vaio PCG-FXA32. First thing happened is that the CD Rom Drive is not working, so I grabbed my external CD/DVD combo drive and swap it with the laptop, and it works. But before I could swap the drives, I have to remove the front cover that is on top of the keyboard. When I pulled it out, there's this plastic ribbon cable that is rather small. While I was doing the swap, I didn't noticed that I was already stressing the cable too much. And when I finally finished all the installation of the softwares and swaped back the old drive. The laptop won't turn-on now.


So I suspected early on that it was the ribbon cable, because the ribbon cable caters the power button. So I decided to try to fix it up by using some jumper wires because it only affected just a pin. But then again, I stressed the cable again and all the pins are now damaged.


This is supposed to be a simple laptop reformat. Haii... Going on the repairs, I accidentally mixed up and messed up the connectors, I think I must have soldered some pins together so the power button is practically useless now. I tried every combination but the damn laptop won't cooperate with me.


And since the connector pins are so tiny for my bulky soldering iron, I nearly spent a whole day just to fix the damn power button. And when I'm finally cleaning-up the repairs. Guess what, the power adapter now gave way. But luckily there is a spare power adapter from the last laptop I tried to repair, the ASUS one (I never really fixed the keyboard thing, because it is already faulty and fixing it will be ridiculously intensive, but I did fixed the hinge and the softwares are working perfectly, hehe).


And finally got the laptop to power up and all of the softwares are all working perfectly. But there's a catch, since I messed up the power button, once you plug the power to the laptop, it will power-on automatically without pushing any button. And when you shut the laptop down, it will power-up again automatically without pushing any buttons, so you have to pull the power cord immediately. 


I'll just have to fix the cursed Jurassic laptop some other time.


Now the lesson is that to always take note all the parts before dismantling it and you must be very careful when you're handling ribbon cables, they can easily snap, don't bend them too much or flex them too much. It is not as flexible as it looks. Maybe that's why a hate slider phones, hahahaha.


I'll post some pictures soon.