Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

To be precise, I have a very good Acer Obsidian for working from home, which is great for any work I need to do. It has enough RAM and a very fast AMD processor, as well as a really good Nvidia GeForce 4070. So I have everything I need for working from home. However, this notebook is more like a desktop computer as it is not something you would want to carry around.

For daily use on the go, I have an IdeaPad with a touchscreen display and a palm-rejection stylus. It is the predecessor of the Lenovo Yoga.

It is fine, but for the use of the touchscreen it is quite big, and in tablet mode, it is quite thick. However i still really like it and it is fine notebook. However it is a bit old, and 4GB of RAM is not much today. However it still works, and can be used.

However, I did receive a gift from a friend. It's an Acer Switch 3, a x64 notebook with a detachable keyboard and a touchscreen with palm rejection. It's a really nice, powerful and compact piece of hardware. It is very similar to the VisionBook I have already mentioned. The VisionBook is nice too, but with only 2 GB of RAM it's not really useful nowadays.

So I was really happy about the Acer Switch 3 and was told it should work. However, I was unable to power it on, so I guessed that the battery was discharged. However, I had no charger. I ordered the power supply, waited for it to arrive, plugged it in, and... nothing.

I contacted the friend who gave it to me and he told me that it worked, but then his power supply broke and he put it in a drawer. I decided to open the device and take a look inside. The power connector seemed OK, but based on the information about the broken charger, I tried resoldering it and then measuring to see if power was going in. As long as I could trace the routes in the PCB, I measured the correct 19V. However, when I tried to measure the battery, I was unable to detect any voltage.

I then tried to measure the power input on the power supply, and the current on the supply was really close to zero.



I decided to charge the battery manually using a laboratory power supply. I pinned the battery down (ugly, I know) and tried to charge it. After a few hours, the battery was charged and the notebook was able to run on battery power. It even detected the power supply, but when I measured it, there was still no current going through the charger.



So it seemed, that some power chip is dead, and even though the power supply is giving enough power, the notebook does not takes it.

I have soldered two wires to the battery connector, and tried to power the whole notebook externaly through battery paths.

Everything worked. So I ran some more tests: I fully charged the battery, assembled the notebook completely and left it on the charger overnight. The battery was completely dead again in the morning.



So the notebook worked; it was just not taking power from the power supply.

I decided to order the same tablet with a broken screen that I found online for a few euros as a spare part, as I really liked the concept of the device and wanted to try to make it work.

The tablet arrived a few days later and I was really looking forward to repairing my device.

It is also worth mentioning that disassembling the notebook is really tricky and requires a lot of patience and care. However, I had done it three times already, so I felt experienced.





I have disassembled both devices and, fortunately, found that they are exactly the same. I unscrewed all the screws on the motherboard of both devices and disconnected around ten flex cables and some antenna cables from each of them. Everything was tight and it took a lot of patience to keep everything in condition, but in the end I reconnected the whole motherboard (with the working power part, which I had tried before) to my tablet. I reconnected everything and carefully checked all the flex cable connections. I also measured the voltages and battery. Everything seemed OK. So I decided to give it a try. I powered it on and everything worked! I was so happy! I gave it a while to also test the charging. It was charging — the percentage on the screen was rising — and everything was fine. I also decided to try running it on just the adaptor. I disconnected the battery and the tablet was still running on just the power supply. Everything was as it should be. I reconnected the battery and let it charge fully. I then did some final tests and everything was fine, so I powered it off, disconnected the charger and started to put all the covers back on.

I screwed in all the screws and the only thing left to do was to snap the back of the device back into place. It was a bit tricky, but I've done it three or four times before, so it shouldn't be a problem. However, I snapped about 90 per cent of the 'locks' and everything fitted. However, only about one or two centimetres were missing. I pushed it with my thumb to snap it back into place, and then I heard a crack.



The last lock on the cover was possibly not in good condition, and after snapping it, the display cracked somehow. So all my work was wasted and half the screen was unresponsive.

I was unbelievably angry and sad. Hours of work wasted!

To be continued...