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[Ken T]

We had a Sony laptop in with a duff hard drive last week. The customer wanted us to get what we could off the hard drive, and source a replacement. Now it was one of theose "diddy ones", you know small and perfectly formed, with a 1.8" HD, so after a lot of tricks we managed to get most of his work off, and then started sourcing a new hard drive. For a 1.8", 80G hard drive, suitable for a Sony they want : (make sure you are sitting down   ) £538   . Yes and you don't get a free laptop with that either.   Supposedly they are very rare and hard to come by. Hell for that money, you could just about buy 2 cheap new laptops.

Why do people buy sony's ?. The guts are based on standard chipsets, made by Intel, or Via, or Nvidia, so they are not really any different from any other laptop, except they look nice, and are a right B***D to get into, and the guts are not very nice.  

Rant temporarily over!

Ken

[Kevin Wood]

Agreed. The Sony POS I inherited has a "MagicGate" slot. Obviously engineered to try to lock me into using their overpriced memory cards. Sadly I'm not a big enough mug to buy cameras, MP3 players, etc. from the idiots so it sits idle. Would have been much more useful if it had been a SD/MMC slot.

Cue theboy with an offer to educate it with Sammy. (what it deserves, in fairness.)

Kevin

[Martin_1962]

Problem with Sony stuff and their proprietry designs is quite often they are the best choice.

Video Cameras - Sony are best at this - both of mine are Sony, but the old ones pickup tube is knackered.

[jereboam]

Never had a Sony laptop, but virtually all my consumer electronics are from Sony, and I find the stuff pretty good.  

The 17-year old camcorder doesn't work too well these days, and we had a bit of trouble with a CD player about 15 years ago, but the rest of stuff is all OK.  Need to to clean out the VCR, as it's eating tapes, but we never use it anyway.

[Debs.]

I have friends in Japan and have spent some time with them staying here a my house too.
I think the cost of spare parts for Sony equipment is indicative of the Japanese culture and in particular their attitude to always desiring to have the 'newest' techie gadgets.
My Japanese friends would see the failure (even a premature one) of a gadget to be an opportunity to upgrade to a newer (better?) one.
Where`as I`d just be plain 'gutted' and disappointed to have lost the use of something I needed.
I guess it`s a cultural difference and the Japanese primarily build/design/market for their own home market`s attitudes in mind.  

[Ken T]

I don't know if they have changed the chemistry of the metal used for DC sockets,  but we are getting more and more where the board is actually burnt

     PS  the fuse is still intact !.

We are having to do a lot of cutting back damaged tracks, fitting inline fuses etc to get them working. Dells can't be fixed so easily, because of that stupid power supply ID signal, if the track gets damaged here, you can't link it, and the laptop will refuse to charge the battery. More and more stuff is designed to last 366 days and no more.  

Ken

[Marks DTM Calib]

I don't know if they have changed the chemistry of the metal used for DC sockets,  but we are getting more and more where the board is actually burnt

     PS  the fuse is still intact !.

We are having to do a lot of cutting back damaged tracks, fitting inline fuses etc to get them working. Dells can't be fixed so easily, because of that stupid power supply ID signal, if the track gets damaged here, you can't link it, and the laptop will refuse to charge the battery. More and more stuff is designed to last 366 days and no more.  

Ken

As it should be ken, the fault is before the fuse!

Remember that the fuse is designed to protect the supply, not the kit, if it goes the kit is already faulty.

I wonder what is causing the burning, I would guess dry joints through stress fractures in the solder as a result of the weight of a power connector hanging off the socket.

The ideal solution for these would be on repair to add additional flying wires from the connector to the PCB so a true flexi joint is created if (possible).

From a design perspective it would be the sort of connector I would have mounted in a sub assembly in the case wth flying leads to the PCB to avoid such problems.

[Kevin Wood]

Looks like that whole pad on the PCB has got very hot as it conducted the heat out from the loose connection.

The current draw through these connectors has got so high that a little resistance can cause a lot of heat. No overloading required. It does look like something should have been done to isolate the flexing from the PCB.

Kevin

[korum]

As a Person who repairs laptops all day i must say we get very few sonys back into the workshop.

alot of the ones we do get in are damaged by the customer (it really amazes me how sony owners treat there laptops   )

There laptops are avoided by alot of engineers at work as they seem to have more screws than are really needed but they are solidly put together machines and i would recomend anyone buying a laptop to get a sony if possible

[Ken T]

I don't know if they have changed the chemistry of the metal used for DC sockets,  but we are getting more and more where the board is actually burnt

     PS  the fuse is still intact !.

We are having to do a lot of cutting back damaged tracks, fitting inline fuses etc to get them working. Dells can't be fixed so easily, because of that stupid power supply ID signal, if the track gets damaged here, you can't link it, and the laptop will refuse to charge the battery. More and more stuff is designed to last 366 days and no more.  

Ken

As it should be ken, the fault is before the fuse!

Remember that the fuse is designed to protect the supply, not the kit, if it goes the kit is already faulty.

I wonder what is causing the burning, I would guess dry joints through stress fractures in the solder as a result of the weight of a power connector hanging off the socket.

The ideal solution for these would be on repair to add additional flying wires from the connector to the PCB so a true flexi joint is created if (possible).

From a design perspective it would be the sort of connector I would have mounted in a sub assembly in the case wth flying leads to the PCB to avoid such problems.

Interestingly enough, Sony do this in a lot of their machines. Packard Bell also do in one or two models, but not that one !. I still think the chemistry has changed, bad joints at the DC connector have been around for many years, and the infamous TV dry joint where you thump it and it works for a while, but its only recently that I have seen this level of burning/corrosion. A dell the other day, the DC socket fell out, all joints had corroded.

Ken

[Marks DTM Calib]

I don't know if they have changed the chemistry of the metal used for DC sockets,  but we are getting more and more where the board is actually burnt

     PS  the fuse is still intact !.

We are having to do a lot of cutting back damaged tracks, fitting inline fuses etc to get them working. Dells can't be fixed so easily, because of that stupid power supply ID signal, if the track gets damaged here, you can't link it, and the laptop will refuse to charge the battery. More and more stuff is designed to last 366 days and no more.  

Ken

As it should be ken, the fault is before the fuse!

Remember that the fuse is designed to protect the supply, not the kit, if it goes the kit is already faulty.

I wonder what is causing the burning, I would guess dry joints through stress fractures in the solder as a result of the weight of a power connector hanging off the socket.

The ideal solution for these would be on repair to add additional flying wires from the connector to the PCB so a true flexi joint is created if (possible).

From a design perspective it would be the sort of connector I would have mounted in a sub assembly in the case wth flying leads to the PCB to avoid such problems.

Interestingly enough, Sony do this in a lot of their machines. Packard Bell also do in one or two models, but not that one !. I still think the chemistry has changed, bad joints at the DC connector have been around for many years, and the infamous TV dry joint where you thump it and it works for a while, but its only recently that I have seen this level of burning/corrosion. A dell the other day, the DC socket fell out, all joints had corroded.

Ken

Its wont be the metal, it will be the high power of these modern laptops.....the current through those connectors now is 5-10amps....add a few ohms of resistance (stressed solder joint) and they get hot

[Ken T]

I wonder if its not due to the rubbish we call solder these days. Back in the old days, they designed these things to be held in by the solder, because of the wetting, you would get a good 2-3mm of solder fillet above the PCB, and the lands were much bigger dia, so there was a lot of metal holding the socket/component in place. Now a days the joint does not wet the component leg very well, you are luck if the the PCB hole is filled at all, the top land is very small so all the force is taken by the plated thro hole, which its not designed to do, so it rips out soon, and you get the Dell effect,  eg a broken track in a buried layer so the battery won't charge and the laptop is effectively scrap. I think all PCB's should be designed so that all power connections shouuld be done on the top layer, with a large surface contact area, and no ground planes within 2.54cm !. Mind you things would last a lot longer, which would upset the clowns in control who like us to spend our money buying useless chinese crap.  I just got a BGA soldering machine, type T862++, and the control system is as you would expect from China, totally useless. It looks pretty but..............

Anyone good at reprogramming Atmels?

Ken

[Ken T]

I don't know if they have changed the chemistry of the metal used for DC sockets,  but we are getting more and more where the board is actually burnt

     PS  the fuse is still intact !.

We are having to do a lot of cutting back damaged tracks, fitting inline fuses etc to get them working. Dells can't be fixed so easily, because of that stupid power supply ID signal, if the track gets damaged here, you can't link it, and the laptop will refuse to charge the battery. More and more stuff is designed to last 366 days and no more.  

Ken

As it should be ken, the fault is before the fuse!

Remember that the fuse is designed to protect the supply, not the kit, if it goes the kit is already faulty.

I wonder what is causing the burning, I would guess dry joints through stress fractures in the solder as a result of the weight of a power connector hanging off the socket.

The ideal solution for these would be on repair to add additional flying wires from the connector to the PCB so a true flexi joint is created if (possible).

From a design perspective it would be the sort of connector I would have mounted in a sub assembly in the case wth flying leads to the PCB to avoid such problems.

Interestingly enough, Sony do this in a lot of their machines. Packard Bell also do in one or two models, but not that one !. I still think the chemistry has changed, bad joints at the DC connector have been around for many years, and the infamous TV dry joint where you thump it and it works for a while, but its only recently that I have seen this level of burning/corrosion. A dell the other day, the DC socket fell out, all joints had corroded.

Ken

Its wont be the metal, it will be the high power of these modern laptops.....the current through those connectors now is 5-10amps....add a few ohms of resistance (stressed solder joint) and they get hot

They're not actually that much more,  the old Advent 6400 series used 3.16 A, but a lot of modern ones use Celeron M's which don't take much. They are slow as hell, but punters buy them so.....  Some use 120W psu's, which is 6A, like the Pack Bell in the photo, and admittantly there are a fair few machines still using Intel P4's, that tend to overheat and gobble power. Interestingly enough there are a lot of replacement 120W psu's coming in from china (that place again !). We got a laptop, which was obviously faulty because it had killed 3 power packs in a very short time. I fitted a properly made 90w psu (liteon) and ran it for several days with no problems. Looking at a blown 120W psu showed the caps had blown, chinese (lack of) standards again !.

Ken

[Marks DTM Calib]

I wouldn't knock China, they have some of the best manufacturing capabilities on the planet and the highest standards. You have to remember that assembly is 99% automatic anyway! We curently put some production through China and the quality is pretty superior to our europeon production....but the deisgn is good and well documented following a 6 month quality programme I ran on it

As for generic PSU's, its not a clever move to ever use one. PSU design is a real challenge and the efficiency of switch modes is very load dependent so using a 120W at a lower power is going to cause more problems than say a 90W at full power, the manufactureres will have spent big bucks getting the wall wart just right.

The faults you are showing here are fundamental design floors i.e. high stress connectors mounted directly onto a PCB, this is not something that has ever been good practice even in the days of wave soldered through hole items as no PCB can take the stresses no matter what technology used.

As for the solder, its certainly not that, yes there is less of it used on joints these days and that is in part down to the smaller packages and finer pitch BGA's now being adopted, to get large quantities of solder to flow you need heat for an extended period of time and that would destroy other components on the assembly like the oscillators and IC's.

I will have to give you some lessons on PCB techniques as keeping planes so far away from other items simply will not work given the mega edge speeds of modern devices!

Atmels are easy enough to programme (device dependent!).

As for BGA soldering, to get a good machine WILL cost 20K+ (needs laser re-work really)....its a job I would outsource (and do) everytime as ideally you also want to xray the re-work before applying power or you risk destroying the whole unit.

[TheBoy]

Modern (consumer) Sony shite is no better than anyone elses shite.  Only you pay a shit load more for it, then ultimately regret the purchase as you find out its all slightly non standard.