Computer Techs A Repair I'm Really Proud Of [X-Post r/talesfromtechsupport] |
| A Repair I'm Really Proud Of [X-Post r/talesfromtechsupport] Posted: 02 May 2018 05:41 AM PDT TL;DR I repaired a motherboard and am really proud of it! So I'm making this post because I don't have a lot of techie friends but I'm just super psyched and had to tell someone. I work at a small, locally owned computer repair shop (we have three employees), and I've been here for almost three years. I received all of my technical training here, so I have no formal training what-so-ever. Over the last year, I've been slowly teaching myself about board-level repairs, mostly on MacBooks. I've managed to pull off a few repairs, but after completing them I still felt like I had a lot of questions and wasn't sure if I had just been lucky enough to stumble across the solution. This time, however, I can confidently say that I figured it out entirely due to my knowledge of board-level repair!! Here are some pictures for reference. https://imgur.com/a/pBO7Q2M Now, here's the story :) A customer brought in a MacBook Air that seemed to charge fine (the light on the adapter would go from green to orange), but it wouldn't turn on. The tech checking it in poked around a bit, but couldn't really find anything, so he left it for me to look at later. When I got my hands on it, I tried resetting the SMC and that worked fine, but it still wouldn't turn on. Next up I went to test each power rail to see if they were all reading what they should, so I disassembled it to have the bare motherboard on my desk. I pulled up the schematic pdf and the boardview on my computer to find where to test each rail, then hooked it up to the adapter. The first one I went to check was PPBUS_G3H, one of the more important rails that is always on whenever the computer is on power, and noticed that the area where I was touching was hot! I felt around a little bit and was almost burned by the problem component! It was a tantalum capacitor that was part of the circuitry providing the 3.3V and 5V rails power, and it had the word CRITICAL right next to it on the schematic. I immediately disconnected the adapter. When I looked closer, I noticed that the thing was even cracked! I then went into our parts closet to see if we had any donor boards, and we didn't. So I just got another MacBook Air board that seemed close in age to the one I was working on and carried it back to my desk. I pulled up the schematics for this board as well and found the page describing the same circuitry as my problem component, and there was one exactly the same! I identified it on the board, double checked the polarity of each of them, then went to the rework station and swapped them out. The swap went without a hitch, which I think is pretty cool considering I did it with just a heat gun (not even a rework station, we don't have a lot of money around here), tweezers, and a syringe of flux! I took it back to my bench, cleaned off the flux and, lo and behold, it worked perfectly! All in all, very customer, very happy tech :) Thanks for reading! [link] [comments]  |
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