GT683dxr with smoking jack

Greetings.

My GT683 is now 5 years old and I haven't had any problems with it up until now. I have replaced the battery and the power adapter, but don't consider that to be problems. The other day I had a bit of smoke come out of the jack area when I plugged in and had a burning smell also. I immediately unplugged it. It does work without plugging it in but the battery will run down at some point so I haven't tried to use it that way. I got a replacement jack, watched some youtube and tried to take the laptop apart. Well, since I have zero computer repair knowledge I didn't get very far. Yes, it was comical.

I took it to a local shop, but he said he did not feel comfortable adding a ground wire, like is mentioned here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/msi-gt680-dc-power-jack-burnt-out-motherboard-needed.728697/
and recommended a new motherboard.

That is out of my budget at the moment and I feel like it would be foolish to take that step without trying the ground wire option first.... or is there a reason not to try it? I certainly don't want to make it worse.

Also, how to find someone in my area that could do this for me?

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

I would first ask some different computer repair places in your area to see if any of them do actual board repair like that. If you contact a shop that doesn't do repair themselves, they might have someone they can recommend or possibly outsource it to. Did you contact MSI to see if they could fix it through an out of warranty repair, as well?

 

Thank you for replying.

I called MSI and spoke to people in several departments. The last one said, "I have bad news, and bad news". 1) Not under warranty (which I knew) and 2) They don't have parts for it or work on them any longer. I asked him about the ground wire and he could not recommend doing it.

I called a repair shop that listed motherboards repaired and they don't fix that sort of thing. All he could do is replace the jack just like I already did. He looked up the board and said it was a very poor design, and even if I got another one it may not last long. He would not consider adding the ground wire. He did not know of any places and said those places usually did them in lots of 1000 or more, not just one.

I didn't have much time today to call around, and probably won't tomorrow. Maybe in a couple of days I will be able to.

I am hoping someone will read this that has some experience with adding the ground wire and could tell me how much longer their board lasted after they did it, and where could I get it done.

Thanks again!

 

Good luck seeing if you can find someone to help on adding that. Keep us updated if you make any progress with it.

 

You probably have a broken power jack that is causing sparks/arcs when connected.

 

I had the jack replaced and it smoked again as soon as it was plugged in afterwards.

 

More likely it's a leaking capacitor then; there's a few heavy-duty ones near the jack, for obvious reasons. Find out which is the culprit by having the motherboard in plain sight and plugging in the cable.

 

Is that something that can be repaired ?

 

Yes, quite easily so. These power capacitors are relatively large, so they take little finesse to solder. No harder than the jack, at least. Cost of the ic itself is negligible, too. Might also diy, but you'd need good flux since the pcb's lead-free solder has a melting point above of what regular soldering irons can handle.

 

Thanks for the info. I have only soldered lead for stained glass and that's been many years ago, so I am not up to the task. Hopefully I can get someone to work on it soon and will pass the info along.