[HELP]Dead Alienware 17 (2013) by EVGA Percision X GPU Tool[REQUEST]

Ok,
ive dissambled the Laptop, and you were right the cable that has the sdcard reader text printed on it connets the power button to the motherboard and its damaged.
Good news is that all elecritical components cpu, gpu, ram, wifi seem to be ok.



The daugther board on the left is the powerbutton.
This design is pretty strange, over 4 cables and daughter boards chained toghter.
my guess would be that this cable is pretty hard to find and expensiv.
Would be worth it to get that cable and see if the laptop boots again?
If not i will sell the components and see if i can get at least some money out of that.

 

Couldnt find without board:
Klick

Partnumber is YXVW4

Also its unlikely that something is damaged, as I already asked you to, you confirmed that the mainboard isn't shorted, since the power supply didnt turn the green light off.

Also the "electrial engineers" at your university very likely broke the cable, so you might not want to send anything to them anymore.

 

Thanks a lot for your fast answer and help,
im a noob so i would be pretty much clouless.
Thanks for the advice, youre right the cable worked the laptop beeped before i gave them the laptop.
I will try to get the daughter board and the post the results.

 

Its a generic flat flex cable, measure the pitch, number of pins/contacts and you can buy those at Mouser/Digikey/ebay/etc.

It might be a bit longer, but you can fold those things.

And yes, that flat flex was pinched or someone left it over a screw hole and forced real hard to pass a screw through it..

And its its only for the sd-card reader, the laptop should work without it, or Alienwares are more stingy about missing things?

Powered lots of laptop boards with just cpu and one stick of ram on my bench when doing repair, never found a motherboard that would not boot with missing expansion boards.

 

No, Alienware actually takes the cable meant for an SD reader and slaps it onto the powerbutton daughterboard. I've seen this couple of times. Don't let the label misguide you.

 

It goes indeed to the card reader, but then goes to somewhere else, because there is a much bigger cable going to the card reader and into the mobo, so that cable is for something else, as you said, maybe the power button sub-board.

 

It's AW engineering at its best.

Huehuehuehehuehue

 

The 11-13 inch Sony Vaios where way worse, 20 cables and 12 sub-boards inside a tiny chassis, sure can do, sub-boards made of flex pcb's, like the card reader, that would break over time with use, but they packed some nice tech, core2duo laptop with RAID-ed SSD module witih 256GB, sweet, no so sweet the 20 minutes with a tweezer to take it apart.

Also, isn't that AW model from the Clevo design times?

 

This is getting off the subject here, but if this laptop is so valuable when it comes to your studies, what the hell are you doing screwing around w/it?

If you can, by some miracle of a chance, get the laptop working, I'd leave it alone and not mess around w/it any further. You should be able to find a replacement keyboard, or cable, on eBay as well. Also too, you may simply be able to use an external keyboard via a USB port on it.

Finally, don't let engineers touch it , but instead, bring it to your campus computer tech's. Most campuses have a place for the maintenance of their campus computers.

PS - By the way, you may be able to get a student discount through Dell if you need to replace it.

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Why? aside from giving it to people who don't know what they're doing, he did an excellent job finding out the problem with our guidance. And considering his situation which is he needs a notebook but has no money, this was the best he could do.