Just resurrected a dead 5300CS!

#1 Sat, 25 Feb 2012 - 05:36 68kMLA

Last week, I bought a powerbook 5300cs that wouldn't power up, according to the owner, for $5 locally. Figured it just needed a new power jack. Turns out pressing the reset button would sometimes yield a green light only, a chime and then freezing, or just some noise from the speakers. I took the laptop apart and found no obvious signs of any damage, but when I looked closely at the processor, I noticed that one side of the processor's pins broke free from the logic board!

Anyway, I resoldered (by hand

) all of the 603e's pins, and got the machine up and running again. Since I figure the heat from the processor caused the solder to crack in the first place, I applied a little bit of thermal paste to the chip.

Hopefully this helps anyone that has a powerbook with similar issues

#2 Wed, 29 Feb 2012 - 14:43 68kMLA

Hahaha I just reached for the "Like" button. Gotta spend less time on Faceborg.

Well done

Have you ever done any soldering at that pitch before?

#3 Wed, 29 Feb 2012 - 15:52 68kMLA

Baby that hard drive...one of mine just gave up the ghost, and it was quite a chore refitting the drive sled to take a 12.5" factor drive from a 1400. The originals for the 5300 were these weird 17mm drives with holes in different places.

Congrats on the successful resoldering!

#4 Thu, 1 Mar 2012 - 03:36 68kMLA

Hahaha I just reached for the "Like" button. Gotta spend less time on Faceborg.
Well done Have you ever done any soldering at that pitch before?

As a matter of fact, yes

I've done micro-BGA stuff by hand (Well, the stencil part) in the past too. Just an FYI, you can make a decent buck on eBay through repairing macs.

Either way it was pretty damn frustrating, and it was a decent amount of work, but I would have hated tossing the powerbook.

#5 Fri, 2 Mar 2012 - 05:08 68kMLA

Should have just gotten the reflow nozzle on your BGA station and did it that way. Thats what I do.

#6 Sat, 7 Apr 2012 - 05:26 68kMLA

I was too afraid to burn the chip, and I wanted to put new solder on the pins, so the reflow station I have was not going to work (theres on way in hell I'll ever lay solder paste correctly).