Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

[wegothosed]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

Well, I decided to take the plunge. I implimented spitz method and soldered the wire to the right side of the diode if you are looking at the dc jack on the input end of it. While holding the board on the side where the dc jack housing is visible. Long story short, I only soldered the wire to one contact point and it is working now. I was lucky that there was only minor damage to this board. One of the things I found was that the negative pin on the ac jack in the middle had a noticeable crack in the solder blob, which I desoldered and resoldered w/ flux and then ran the jumperwire fix aswell for good measure. We'll see how she holds up! Thanks for everyones experience and advice.

[Stewpadasso]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

Success, I fixed a customer's MA7 with just a jumper from the main pin back wrapped around to one pin on the diode. Thanks for all the great information. This forum rocks : )

[4dPcrepair]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

I have been doing this with ma7's for about a year now. I have done about 30 of them and have noticed that boards that have an INTEL processor have the diode shown in most of the pictures earlier in the post and are fairly easy to do. However the AMD CPU boards are slightly different and I have not figured out where to run the jumper wire to. I saw a picture posted earlier of a ma3 board which is different from the ma7's but its not the AMD one's that I've been encountering. If anyone has any idea of where to go with the jumper wire please let me know I have 3 or 4 of these AMD board collecting dust that I would like to get going.

[Spitz]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

I have been doing this with ma7's for about a year now. I have done about 30 of them and have noticed that boards that have an INTEL processor have the diode shown in most of the pictures earlier in the post and are fairly easy to do. However the AMD CPU boards are slightly different and I have not figured out where to run the jumper wire to. I saw a picture posted earlier of a ma3 board which is different from the ma7's but its not the AMD one's that I've been encountering. If anyone has any idea of where to go with the jumper wire please let me know I have 3 or 4 of these AMD board collecting dust that I would like to get going.

Its the plated thru hole that goes bad so you need to run a jumper to any component that the artwork traces would normally goto if the plated hole was good. You need to do this on both sides of the board. You only need to go to one component on each side because it is not the artwork traces that are bad.

[4dPcrepair]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

Its the plated thru hole that goes bad so you need to run a jumper to any component that the artwork traces would normally goto if the plated hole was good. You need to do this on both sides of the board. You only need to go to one component on each side because it is not the artwork traces that are bad.

So I should follow the traces and volt meter each component until I find where the power stops? Not sure I'm following you on the both sides of the board comment? I've only been doing it directly from the DC main pin on the top side to the first diode booth on the same side of the board.

Is there anywhere to find diagram's or schematics of these boards I tried searching but wasn't having much luck so I gave up.

[Spitz]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

So I should follow the traces and volt meter each component until I find where the power stops? Not sure I'm following you on the both sides of the board comment? I've only been doing it directly from the DC main pin on the top side to the first diode booth on the same side of the board.

Just follow the traces and find one component that should be connected and add a wire. The artwork is not bad so all the components are still tied together. It needs to be done on both sides because there is artwork and components on both sides that need the power. If you measure power on the components on both sides of the board and it still does not work, then you have another problem. This will not fix them all.

[komputerstore]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

I have similar problem but slightly different scenario. Gateway MA7, works fine with charged battery. But as soon as plug in AC Adapter, burning smell comes. Took it apart, measured the resistance on board on DC + and - pins, it shows about 20 ohm. Which represents some kind of short. On a healthy MB, it should be around 10k. Then, I started examining components, one by one. .1 micro F caps, 2 of them, next to DC jack, took them off teh board, tested with cap meters, showed good. the 10k tiny resistor, tested good. The inductor between negative and ground, tested good. one dual diod, after these 2 capacitors, tested good. The FET after that tested good. Thats where I pretty much lost it. and started pulling my hair. I can buy another board for $60, but its not the point. I really want to find the problem. I have good labs, and all equipment, including Oscilloscope, function generator, bench multimeter, variable power supply and all the usual stuff that an electronics lab should have. Please help me go forward. What else I can check, if there is a short circuit between - and + of DC jack?

[severach]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

The variable power supply will find the problem. Unlike a plug in power supply which will shut down when shorted or gladly burn things up with too much power, the current limiter will allow you ramp up the current very slowly so that you can pinpoint the problem before it goes up in smoke.

Be sure to hook up the leads with the correct polarity. Backwards leads burn stuff out fast. I attach the minus lead to one of the ground holes ensuring that accidentally attaching the positive lead also to ground only shorts the supply. Bench supplies are designed to handle full shorts.

Keep in mind that the part that gets hot may not be the faulty part. If a capacitor is shorted downstream of a transistor, the transistor with it's higher resistance will get hot though it may be perfectly fine and just doing it's job trying to supply much too large of load. If two planes are shorted below a capacitor it might seem like the capacitor is damaged. Pulling parts helps get past these problems. If you're real tricky shorted planes can sometimes be fixed with controlled burns. The heat destroys the glue so the offending plane can be peeled up and cut off.

If you don't know your currents try applying a current to assorted bits of wire to get a feel for current and heat output.

[4dPcrepair]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

I am going to post some pictures later of the board because I've been staring at an Intel board that I've done 30 of without problems and cant figure out where to go on the AMD board still. I have burned up 2 boards by trying to run the jumper to the closest one to the jack.

[4dPcrepair]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

Yeah I guess my wife's Nikon camera wont take a picture of the board without it being blurry. I did however get a new AMD MA3 in and found it was different the both the Intel board and the other AMD board I have, However it had a similar looking diode with 2 pins on one side and one on the other. Almost identical to the ones on all the Intel boards, I looked over the one I'm having issues finding the point to jump to and I cannot find anything that looks remotely close in that area of the board. The model number of this board is DAOMA3MB6D2 REV I cant seem to find much info on it other then used ones on Ebay and such.

[4dPcrepair]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

Finally got things figured out with amd board. I have another however with a broken headphone jack. Having issue's locating a replacement because I wasn't able to read enough on the broken one to get a part number. Pulled one off of a scrape board I have but it seems that again intel and amd boards use different components. If anyone has any parts diagrams or such please help me out. The board model is DAMA3FMB6E1.

[SheDevil]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

Is there anywhere to find diagram's or schematics of these boards I tried searching but wasn't having much luck so I gave up. .

I found this one not sure if it would be your ver though.
Also if you put the word quanta in front of ma? gateway, it pulls up more direct links to some schematics.

As I a found trying to fix my MA2A, the schematic posted in another thread HERE quanta ma2a rev c gateway had fewer silkscreen marks that matched than the MA2 rev 2A . even though mine says MA2A REVC
While I fixed mine for about 6months after just clearing out as much of the bad solder, and resoldering the pos pin and cleaning it up, it is now not working again.

I tried a jumper wire from pos term on back to the middle arrow, still no luck. Any one fixed one of these MA2A boards?

[trebo]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

just done one of these, same problem as thread title
after removing the power jack it was clear to see that the back 19V pin hole was destroyed on both sides of M/B
after a lot of thought on how I would repair this board, I threaded a 0.5 mil bare wire through the 19V damaged hole to a solder point on the top of M/B and the other end to a solder point on the bottom of board as shown in photos

bit worried that I may not be soldering wire to correct solder points
but it worked OK
lappy up and running and charging battery
sorry lads the last pic should have been first

[zenki]

Re: Gateway MA7 laptop won't charge or run off of A/C

Hello everybody, I was browsing the net to see about this MA7 problem, and found this forum. After seeing the original message left by BTMMIKE, it confirmed what i'd been wondering about - the silly design of POS pin on these sockets, added to a bad design where it goes thru the board, means it does indeed wear a bigger nasty hole in the contact.

The very small photo showed me just what i needed to see, and believe me this is a simple repair

I've attached 2 photos as clear as I could get, so hopefully this will help others with the same problem. As mentioned previously, many ebay-type suppliers don't seem to know what they are selling.

There are 2 main types of this socket - one is used usually by IBM and has a flat rear pin. The Gateway MA7 uses a round pin - the 2 sockets are NOT compatible, cos the pins are just the wrong size for a quick swap-over.
The other point is, most of the suppliers are selling ones with only 2 ground/side contacts, so the socket is less sturdy. The MA7 uses 4 ground/side contacts, a ground/centre contact, and a rear/Positive round pin.

So assuming you have the right one, you can just put a wire from the underside of the positive, and then poke it thru one of the tiny holes shown in the photo. Sorry about the bad soldering shown (lol) here but the local shop had no 1mm tips for me so i'm waiting for one, this was done with a monster 3mm on an Antex

There is a small black fuse (is it a fuse? looks like one to me, it's either that or just an un-needed smoother) sat just behind the rear of the socket (in the photo it links the red to the green area).
It's up to you if you attach to the 'red' side of that instead of directly thru the board as I have done. Depends on how much that part bothers you, but I couldn't get in there to solder to such a small component with my monster tip today

It works fine, done 2 without a hitch and they all start up now with all blue lights showing

Hope this all helps somebody. I'll drop back in again soon and see if anybodys read this

(I soldered a blob directly across from my wire to the nearest good sized component - but I advise just soldering your own wire onto the hole it comes thru. On these boards, no way would my iron get the solder to grip the actual board itself. Maybe bad board surface/solder tip/solder quality - I wont know till I get the proper stuff in a few days.

Good luck with this one

Just want THANK YOU! I just fixed my cousins laptop.