Averatec 3200 DC jack problem
Jan 13th, 2007 by Ian
Recently a burning electric smell started emanating from Oana’s laptop. After some inspection and research, we determined that it was the AC adapter cord melting in the DC jack. After purchasing a new AC adapter off eBay and finding that unfortunately not to be the solution, I went to a local laptop repair shop and described the problem.
The tech said 99% of the time he could fix the problem and that it would cost 120 pounds = $275CAD; if he couldn’t fix the problem, he would charge us ‘only’ $138CAD. Given the laptop is about 2.5 years old and new laptops run about $650CAD it was hard to justify spending that kind of money to fix or attempt to fix. I decided to take the laptop apart again and see if there wasn’t something obvious that I could fix. After taking it apart and putting it back together we researched some more and came up with a site that describes the exact problem.
After spending a few hours reading all the posts on the support forums, I spent the next day calling around to see how much resoldering would cost. I finally found someone who could fix it that day while I waited (not the cheapest quote, but the fastest). I pulled the laptop apart again, retrieved the DC jack board and hiked out to meet the guy. The guy turned out to be a synthesizer maker and it took him about 5 minutes to add solder to the DC jack on the board and give it a quick continuity test.
We’ve had the fixed piece back in the laptop for a couple hours and so far, so good. He only ended up charging me $70CAD which was a pretty decent deal given the other options. We were also fairly unenthusiastic about purchasing a new laptop in the UK and ending up with a useless warranty once we returned to Canada.