Aspire one Not turning on

Hey guys,
I have an Acer Aspire One AO-150(ZG5) and a mischievous nephew. I was working on another laptop and my nephew thought it was cool that the power adapter fit into the Aspire One DC jack. I didn't think anything of it until I later tried to turn on the AO and nothing happened. I took it apart and all seems to be ok on the motherboard(no burnt areas and all capacitors look good). I'm away from home and don't have access to the power adapter and the second battery is dead. Did he kill the battery or would the different voltage kill the motherboard? I'm in need of some help.


Thanks in advance,
Skrillz

 

In my experience, accidentally plugging the wrong adapter into a laptop hasn't caused any problems. Leave the machine sit overnight with no battery attached and try again.

The circuitry that controls the power of the machine will more than likely have filtered off the power and/or tripped a relay to prevent excess current from damaging the system, similar to the way most desktop PC's refuse to excite the power supply if there's a short circuite somewhere in the computer (this is only in ATx power supplies, TX ones will blow with a rather loud BANG!)

Don't quote me on the above tho, as there can be many factors at play here. If the voltage for instance was way in excess of what the AAO usually runs on, you could potentially have a dead motherboard. Or, the adapter may have been the right outside diameter, but could have a smaller inside diameter which could in-turn have displaced the center pin, preventing the proper adapter from making contact. You could also find that the wrong adapter was the right voltage, and the connector a perfect fit, but the amperage could have been so low that it didnt charge the system at all, and the battery may simply have completely discharged.

 

If a relay was tripped is there a way to reset? I'm pretty sure the mobo is dead at this point but I'm still trying to hold onto some kind of hope.

 

It's probably not called a relay as such, but it would have reset over night without a battery or AC adapter plugged in. So if it hasn't sobered up by now, it probably won't. I have read elsewhere on the forums about there being fuses on the motherboard, but they're surface mounted from what I've gathered and probably need to be soldered onto the board.

Is it still in warranty? Does Acer really need to know the wrong plug was used? Can you just ring them and say you woke up to a dead AAO after leaving it on charge overnight?

 

If the adapter voltage is too low, below about 16V then it won't charge the battery. I doubt it was too high, I haven't seen a laptop power supply put out over 20V and the charge chip and the regulators can take that much with some room to spare.

I'm in the process of hacking my Acer One 531h so it can run directly from a 12V deep cycle battery with the battery pack out. Nothing inside the Acer one uses over 5V except the charge circuit and it uses a simple voltage divider that puts out 3.2V or more for any input voltage over 16-17 V which is sent to a comparator set for 3.2 V. If the voltage from the divider is 3.2 V or more then it powers up, if it's less it'll turn on and right back off again. So what I am doing is changing one of the resistors in the voltage divide so I get 3.2V or more out of the voltage divider for input voltages down to about 11.5 V

The drawback is you have to make sure the battery is out if you are using only 12V in but using the AC adapter or an auto adapter set to 19V the system still works and charges the battery just like always. It just takes a little more effort on my part to make sure I have the battery out when running 12V input which is the only way I use it in my boat anyway because it doesn't fit in the Tough Tray II mount very well with the battery pack and it's just extra weight.

By running it directly off of 12 V I gain some power savings lost to the inefficiency of the auto power adapter kicking up the voltage only to have the Acer power supply knock it back down so my power usage even with both the Cellular modem and GPS enabled is below 10W (Another reason I leave the battery pack out is it draws more current trying to charge the battery even if the battery is fully charged)