My Neighborhood Watch #97 - Reporting Events Around us

Having multiple streams of income has been the other of the day in many parts of the world due to economic realities. Some persons get involved in some legitimate side hustles that would help compliment their income.

I happened to extend my tentacles into the field of computer maintenance and repairs. I have acquired a whole lot that could fetch me some income though it hasn't been on a bed of roses as I had to couple this skill acquisition with my academics, I guess you can relate what that means.

Learning from my boss had been fun, though there were some days I felt like quitting due to the stress and some attitudes displayed by my boss that weren't palatable but I'm determined to acquire all that's expected of me putting every discouragement behind bars.

I benefit more during school vacations as I have ample time to solely concentrate on the skill acquisition. I have lost count of the number of clients we've brought back smiles to their faces as a result of profering solution to their faulty gadgets.

I will never forget one night we were about to leave the shop when a young damsel worked in with tears in her eyes ready to be collected by the cheek, she mistakenly poured water in a laptop the elder sister borrowed to run a school project she was to present in a couple days and the pc refuses to come on, ur was so pathetic that night. We had to help out but it wasn't without a reward.

It's my pleasure to share with you today how a client faulty laptop got rectified. The HP 630 laptop had been with my boss for some days. It would interest you to know that in every repairs of an electronic device, the greatest task is in the troubleshooting and it could take a lengthy period of time to ascertain fault.

The fault of the HP 630 was that it doesn't charge when its charger is connected to it. The tracing of the fault(troubleshooting) commenced with the testing of its charger to know if it's faulty using a workable multimeter. The digital multimeter is set to the 20volts dc. The charger was connected to the mains while the charger mouth(the point that is plug into the laptop) was tested using the digital multimeter. It gave a perfect reading of 19.5volts which indicated that the charger wasn't faulty.

At this point we were left with no other option than to uncoupled the laptop to have a closer interaction with it's motherboard.

After getting out the laptop's motherboard, the troubleshooting on the motherboard continues; the charger was plugged into the laptop's charging port connected to the motherboard through an extension cable.

It was noticed after allowing the connected charger to remain plugged in for some minutes that the temperature of the charging integrated circuit (ic) was extremely high which clearly points out that it's faulty though we had to carry out a confirmatory test by reading the IC with the multimeter to check for continuity, the fact here is that if it reads continuity(zero value on the multimeter), it therefore means it's faulty and as proposed, one of the two ICs was faulty as it read continuity.

This was further confirmed when we had the same result when the two ics were unmounted from the motherboard and read using the blower, a tool used for mounting and unmounting of components from an electronic device motherboard.

Finally, we were able to identify the fault and had to move ahead with its replacement. We got the same IC from another laptop's motherboard and mount it on the client's motherboard and it worked perfectly as the charging indicator light turns on when the charger was plugged into the laptop's charging port.

On coupling of the laptop we discovered that the laptop turns on when booted but did not display. An emerging fault other than the one that had been successfully rectified.

We made RAM changes but it wasn't still displaying so we had to rework the processor after which the laptop displayed. It was quite funny and I could call that the awakening of the sleeping dog or unbargained latent fault.

I personally had to couple the laptop based on my boss instructions. It is always the joy of every technician to come to a perfect conclusion were faults are technically identified and rectified.

I hope you've learnt one or two from this post, till some other time, have a wonderful day.
I'm inviting @nsijoro @basil20 and @kabirul4922 to engage in this post. One 💕