Thinkpads Forum

A 600X that I setup for a friend is now giving him problems. A few months ago while I was working on it with the AC power adapter connected (no battery) it would occasionally lose power when the input jack was jiggled. It seemed that the problem might be related to the joint where the DC input jack is connected to the motherboard. I told him about the problem, and we decided that he should just keep the battery in all the time. This seemed to work fine for awhile, but now it seems that the problem has progressed to the point that the battery will not charge sufficiently to boot up the computer. He and the laptop are in another state for a few months. I wonder if a good solution would be for him to get an external battery charger for a 600X, and just use that to charge the battery and operate the 600X off battery power alone. Any suggestions appreciated.

Gary

What is your location?? I have a spare that is in great condition collecting dust. $15 + shipping reasonable??

Thanks vanaya. Hopefully that will buy some time for this 600X. I wonder if anyone can tell me the likelihood of eventually being able to repair the intermittent power loss problem. I cleaned out the input DC jack, but it didn't make any difference, so I suspect that it is some kind of cold solder joint where the jack is soldered to the motherboard. If I knew how to dismantle everything to get to the motherboard I would give resoldering it try. Is there anything online on how to do that? Or is it more likely to be something other than a solder joint problem?

Thanks,

Gary

gkaucher wrote:If I knew how to dismantle everything to get to the motherboard I would give resoldering it try. Is there anything online on how to do that?

What you are looking for is called the Hardware Maintenence Manual and can be found here:

Hardware Maintenance Manual index - ThinkPad

Near the bottom of the list, under "Older Thinkpad Systems", is the link for the 600X HMM. It is in the Adobe Acrobat .PDF format so you will need that program to open/read the file. It contains detailed diagrams which should allow you to remove everything down to and including the motherboard.

It's possible that your charging problem is related to the DC jack being loose from the motherboard or it could be another component in the charging circuitry.

If you have access to a volt meter you might want to check the voltage output from the power cord..put one lead inside and the other out( set it at 20 volts dc unless it's an autoranging meter),take a volt reading and then wiggle ( or bend ) the cord a couple inches away,,you might find the voltage drops out and that indicates a break inside the wire..what happens sometimes is by lugging in and unpluging the wire gets bent so many times it breaks inside.if you have another adapter you might try it first on the machine...hope that helps..