600E won't power on/charge with AC Adapter

[dracodos]

my 600E won't work with the AC adapter anymore. it will not boot nor charge the battery. I know the adapter works because i've used it on a friends 600E and it works just fine. Do i need to replace the whole motherboard or is there a less pricey chip i can replace?

[Bruce Guttman]

There is a small sub-card that plugs into the main board called a DC/DC card, which has probably failed. If you are lucky, you may find a cracked solder joint where the jack for the AC adapter plugs in. If so, and you are handy with a soldering iron, you may be able to fix everything yourself. If not, the DC/DC card has the jack and the Serial port attached to it. It also has all the connections to the keyboard and display.

If you've never cracked open the Thinkpad before, make sure you download the Hardware Maintenance Manual and print out the assembly diagrams for each step of the disassembly (or have it handy on another computer). Makes for a lot fewer "extra screws".

DC/DC cards usually appear on Ebay from time to time, or you can buy one from the usual parts sources.

Hope this helps.

[dracodos]

BTW Thanks for your help!

I found a sub-card on eBay. After hassles with the post office i got it in the mail today so I popped the old one out, popped the new one in and..... same problem. Whats weird, which i think has to do with my own stupidity, is that after everything was reconnected and i put the battery in, the yellow light for charging goes on. But i don't have the AC adapter connected! This happened before for a while and then it just went out, and then the battery got low and the system shut down. This time it went out and now wll not turn on for nothing! Dead, no response. a huge paperweight

I'm assuming now that i will need to replace the motherboard itself so i've decided to upgrade it to a 600x. searching on eBay i've found them for roughly $50-60 , just the bottom section with the board, sub-card and 500mhz P3. Since i have the harddrive, TV out, CD-ROM and memory i figure this will do, a pure barebones. Is it or can i do better for cheaper?