Dammit Jim!

Laptop Repair Guy points out that Toshiba has issued a warranty extension resulting from a class action lawsuit. As far as I can tell (I’m not a lawyer so better check for yourself) I’m out of luck since I’m in Canada but definitely better to have Toshiba fix it for free than try yourself.

My Toshiba Satellite A70 started having power problems several weeks ago. Although the power cord was plugged in, the computer was not charging and was draining the battery. The little ‘plugged-in’ LED would come up but the battery status LED would still show power coming from the battery. I could jiggle the power cord and it would come back up so I ignored it and got used to jiggling. Unfortunately, the power got more and more touchy and I spent more and more time jiggling the stupid power cord. I first guessed it must be something with my power adaptor but (after cutting open the outer wrap of the cord), I finally put it together that the ‘plugged-in’ LED was coming on but not the battery charging light. This seemed pretty odd. So I finally went out and bought a multimeter. For $20 it was a really good investment and I wish I would have bought one several hours of jiggling frustration earlier. Anyway after the multimeter showed the cord was giving the appropriate 19V without any interruptions, I finally got the bright idea to google the problem and found out that this is a common problem for the A70. Although I have soldered maybe once in my life, the repair didn’t look all that difficult so I thought I’d give it a shot. I ran out and grabbed a crappy Radio Shack iron for $15 and a pack of resistors and circuit board to practice on for $10. You could skip the practice if you were already confident in soldering.

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