Can I Fix This Dell Alienware Laptop With A Weird Intermittent Fault?!

[00:00:00]Hello everyone. Welcome to another video. Today I'm going to be working on this laptop. This is a Dell Alienware laptop and it's pretty high-end. It's a Intel Core i7 9th gen. The customer got in touch and said that his laptop isn't turning on. And could I take a look at it? So, obviously, here we are. So, yeah, it's completely no power. When I press the power button, nothing at all happens. The charger doesn't appear as though it's shorting out, although I can check for voltage on that, but it's likely going to be some sort of a board issue anyway. So, yeah, we're going to see what we can do. If you're new to the channel, my name is the Kodak. I'm an electric technician. I mainly work on games consoles, but I do work on other stuff as well. If you enjoy that kind of thing and you want to see more, be sure to get subscribed, turn on the bell notifications, and then that way you won't miss any future videos. If you need to organize a repair, get in touch at the coder.repair. You can request a quote, book it in, send it over, and I'll do my best to repair it for you.

[00:00:57]And if you need parts and supplies for your repair, you can buy those on my online store at consolefix.shop. With that being said, though, let's get into today's video. You probably don't give a damn about what I've got to say, but just hear me out for a minute. All right, we all know that those sweaty little douchebags with cheesy fingers, living in the mom's basement, drinking Red Bull, and singing over Tik Tok losers are going to break the console.

[00:01:17]And you and I both know that you're too cheap to buy off eBay. You're too impatient to wait for AliExpress and you're just about smart enough to avoid Amazon completely. You can admit it cuz I'm exactly the same. That's why I started my online store, console fix.shop. I'll sell every part you'll need to fix the Xbox One, Series S, Series X, PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch consoles. So, why not give me the money instead of some random dude on eBay? At least if I have it, you know it's not going to waste on some stupid thing like promoted eBay listings or food for the kids or something. If you give me your money instead, I promise I'll use it on useful things like buying views on Tik Tok. So, before you decide to go to one of the more popular sites and line the pockets of some fat cat loser, take a look at my online store. Check out the link in the video description or the top pin comment and get 10% off any order over £25 during checkout. All right, now you can go back to watching this douchebag on YouTube trying to fix something. You >> can't say stuff like that on an average, dude.

[00:02:11]>> You're not my dad, dude. Don't tell me what to do.

[00:02:14]>> That's a thankful. Wait, what?

[00:02:18]Mom.

[00:02:20]So, yeah, like I said, this is not turning on at all. I'm going to just check the charger and see if I can get a voltage reading on it. I wonder if the outer pin is negative or not. Uh, not getting anything on there.

[00:02:35]It could be it could be that the the inner sheathing is negative and then the middle pin is positive.

[00:02:44]Uh it looks like I am getting a reading on that but it's difficult to actually get a connection on the middle pin and the uh you know the middle sheathing to actually be able to check the voltage on it. So what I'll do I think then is I'll take the base off this. I'll plug the charger in and then once I've plug the charger in I can probe the pins on the actual laptop itself and see if I can get a reading that way. That's probably the best way to do it. Just prevent risking shorting the charger out. So, I'll get that I'll get this thing taken apart at least to the point where I can give it a test. I hate that where some screws come out and some screws don't.

[00:03:25]So annoying. Right. So, where does my charger connect to?

[00:03:32]Should pop this off here.

[00:03:39]Looks like it connects to here. And that MOSFET looks rather suspect. So, what I'm going to do is just Well, I'm going to disconnect this first of all. Okay.

[00:03:50]So, Oh, I don't like that.

[00:04:03]cables are slightly exposed there.

[00:04:20]Wow, that's tight.

[00:04:34]Okay.

[00:04:44]Right. So, what I'm going to do then, I'm going to plug the charger in on here.

[00:04:49]And now that the charger is plugged in, I can probe it. Although, that MOSFET looks a bit suspicious to me. The one on the left uh bottom left here. I'll get that in focus in a minute. I just want to probe these pins quickly. Wow, this is really awkward to probe.

[00:05:18]Okay, I do get 19.75 volt there. So, we've got voltage coming in.

[00:05:28]Okay. So, I'll just plug that back in there and then I'm going to probe it again while it's plugged in. Just see if we're getting any kind of voltage drop.

[00:05:39]Nope. 19.75. Okay. So, we've got main power coming in. That's good to see.

[00:05:46]That MOSFET there looks strange. Let me just see if I can get a better angle on that for you. Looks a bit burnt up, doesn't it?

[00:06:03]In fact, it looks very burnt up. It's got N03, so it's likely going to be an end channel resistor intern channel resistor. An intern channel MOSFET uh right here. So, probably going to be 30 volt.

[00:06:17]Um I don't know, like 20 amp or whatever. Uh something like that. But that looks pretty charred up right there. I'm going to say that's going to be the that's going to be the problem. Yeah, that is very very burnt up. So, FLF53.

[00:06:33]I'm going to just do a quick search on that. Uh, nope. I'm not finding anything with that part number. H. Okay. Well, yeah, I'm not finding nothing with that part number, but I'm going to say that's probably going to be an end channel uh end channel MOSFET. I'm going to remove it from circuit though. So, I've disconnected the battery. I'm going to get some heat in the board.

[00:06:58]I would rather not strip this entire laptop down if I can help it.

[00:07:09]Now, it's probably going to be a bit too much heat.

[00:07:12]So, I think I'm going to take the board out. I don't trust it enough to remove it without removing the board from the from the uh housing. So, I think the best option is just to remove the board.

[00:07:27]It's still cool over here, but yeah, this side's going to get a bit too hot, I think.

[00:07:36]Let's remove the SSD.

[00:08:09]I honestly have No idea how to take this apart to be honest. I think I got to strip all the housing down and everything. I don't trust myself doing that. This is why I don't do screen repairs. Uh I'm going to remove it inside the housing. It's not recommended, but it should be okay as long as I'm careful with my heat.

[00:08:42]Yeah, that's stuck on there pretty good.

[00:08:46]It's stuck on there pretty good. That's not good at all. All right. I'm I'm kind of confused here as well because Well, it's not showing as short. So, I'll just check this in diode mode, and it's not actually showing up as short.

[00:09:01]So, I'm probably going to skip that.

[00:09:06]19.5 there, 12 volts there. Okay, I'm getting 12.6 volts on the battery.

[00:09:15]So, the battery is actually reading fine.

[00:09:18]12.6 volts, right? So, for some reason, the recording stopped, but weirdly, it's turning on.

[00:09:29]However, it's not completely turning on.

[00:09:31]So, you see that turning on there right now. Right. So, we got a screen on. We got a picture on the screen, etc., etc. It's turning on fine, but it's cutting out after a minute or so. Just as it gets to the full boot up, it's cutting out, you know, maybe as it's initializing the graphics chip or something like that. So, I've just got the thermal cam on it, and it looks it looks to be those MOSFETs, which are getting warm, but that's about it. So, you guys can't see this. There's a MOSFET getting up to 52° C. That's a bit hot for a MOSFET. So, if we take a look here, you can see this MOSFET here.

[00:10:15]This one right here is getting to around about 50° C.

[00:10:20]56° C. So, what looks to be happening is it's it's getting too hot and then shutting down. 59° C. Yeah, that's too hot for a MOSFET then. Oh, what the [ __ ] was that? That scared me. Jesus Christ.

[00:10:38]That's too hot for a MOSFET. Um 58 50. Yeah, 58° C.

[00:10:46]I would say that this MOSFET is probably causing the main issue and that this MOSFET here is taking the brunt of it because of it. So, I don't think this MOSFET is short, but it's not good.

[00:10:59]It's not good at all. So, I am going to try and remove this MOSFET.

[00:11:17]Right, I've got that sort of. So, that fet there is just Yeah, it's knackered. like that. That shouldn't be sticking to the board like that. Half the MOSFET's come off and half hasn't.

[00:11:34]It shouldn't be sticking to the board like that. It didn't take that much heat, but it's just Yeah, that's not normal at all. So, I'm going to try removing this with just solder now. We should be able to do that.

[00:11:49]Fact that we can get direct heat on it now.

[00:11:58]Might take a little bit to get this off, but it will come off eventually.

[00:12:05]It's basically welded itself to the board.

[00:12:18]Okay, she's coming.

[00:12:32]All right, that's got it.

[00:12:37]Well, that had most of it. Still got a little bit there.

[00:12:42]I do not recommend removing MOSFETs and stuff while the board is in the housing.

[00:12:48]I do it quite regularly.

[00:12:54]But yeah, I don't recommend you do it if you've never done it. At least not on a laptop that you're fixing for a customer.

[00:13:04]You need to know what kind of heat you can your board can take and what kind of heat can what kind of heat is going to soak through to the other side.

[00:13:14]My heat was very controlled there.

[00:13:25]Come on.

[00:13:49]I can't tell if that's still MOSFET or if it's just PCB.

[00:14:00]I honestly can't tell.

[00:14:06]I'll tell you what, let's just have a look in continuity mode. Do we have a con connection with this one here? We do. It's not short to ground.

[00:14:26]Okay. It's going to these inductors here off to the side. PL11.

[00:14:31]All right.

[00:14:37]I think there's enough of the pad there.

[00:14:39]I think that's just substrate underneath. I think it's actually taken part of the PCB's top layer with it because it was just welded onto there, which is fine as long as it's not shorted to any other layer. Right.

[00:14:53]I wonder if it'll still turn on like this. It might help if I had the battery plugged in and the RTC. Uh, always always remove the RTC as well if you're doing any kind of work because you still got power going through it. Right.

[00:15:09]Let's have a look. Let's see what happens.

[00:15:14]This is still going to turn on.

[00:15:18]Okay, we do still get signs of life.

[00:15:23]Keyboard lights up.

[00:15:25]It's going to do a reboot and stuff. It's going to reboot like four or five times now because I've removed the RTC. So, that MOSFET is going to be part of a part of an array and it's going to be more for load balancing. So that could explain why it's not fully booting up. You know, as soon as it starts to use more power, it can't draw enough power because the MOSFET's faulty and that's causing it to shut itself down, right? So, that's definitely a possibility. Okay, fans are spinning now. Well, they were spinning anyway, but they're spinning faster now.

[00:16:01]So, we should see a screen pop up in a second. Let's see if it's able to complete the boot process. Real time clock error. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Right.

[00:16:09]I don't want it to go through recovery.

[00:16:11]So, I'm just going to shut that down.

[00:16:14]Boot it back up. I'm not hearing a hissing now, which I was earlier. Let's have a look at the thermal signature on it. You guys are not going to be able to see this because I've got the laptop sideways. It is booting up now.

[00:16:35]Okay. I'm not seeing any obvious heat spots in one area now.

[00:16:40]That is good to hear.

[00:16:42]And the laptop is booting up. So, the laptop's technically working, but we do need to replace that MOSFET because if we don't, then as soon as it starts to draw more power, it's just going to die because it needs that MOSFET to be able to balance the load. You know, one MOSFET is not going to be enough. It's going to need or rather four MOSFETs is not going to be enough. It's going to need three MOSFETs is not going to be enough. It's going to need four. Um, trust me, all of these big corporations, they're not going to put anything there if they don't have to. Uh, you know, they're not going to put a MOSFET there that doesn't need to be put there because the the bomb cost goes up significantly. So, yeah.

[00:17:21]Uh, I'm going to find a donor board to pop a MOSFET on there. One that's going to be capable of carrying that kind of load. So, it looks like what was happening here is that the laptop was drawing too much power through that one MOSFET and it was causing it to shut down for obviously its own protection. So, I'm going to leave this running through firm mark.

[00:17:39]Just see what happens with it. I'm going to give it like 10 minutes or so. Right.

[00:17:44]Okay. So, this has been running for 6 minutes. I know that's not too long, but it's been running for six minutes and the GPU has been pegged at 100%.

[00:17:54]It's running absolutely fine. So yeah, I'm going to close out of that.

[00:18:02]I'm going to call this good for now and I'm going to replace this MOSFET.

[00:18:06]So let me just make sure it's actually charging.

[00:18:09]So we're on 84% right now. So if I just give it a few minutes just to see if it increases the battery percentage. We need to make sure it's actually charging.

[00:18:21]What I'll do in the meantime and pop that to one side. What I'll do in the meantime is just find a MOSFET on this dino board. There should be one around.

[00:18:41]So, I'm just going to clean this MOSFET up and just Well, I should be able to see it actually. MA19A.

[00:18:49]Just double check this.

[00:18:52]Nope, that's P channel. 6681 is a P channel MOSFET, unfortunately.

[00:18:58]Right. So, I've got some suitable components here. These ones are end channel.

[00:19:04]So, I'm going to remove one of these.

[00:19:37]Okay. So, before I go any further, I'm just going to check this. Let's see what the situation is with it. Is it charging the battery? Yay or nay?

[00:19:49]Let's have a look.

[00:19:54]91%. Yes, it is. Okay. So, we're going to shut this down just while I'm waiting for that hot air to go off.

[00:20:03]So, we'll shut down. So, here's the channel. Here's the end channel MOSFET I've just taken off that donor board.

[00:20:08]So, again, I do not recommend changing components while the board is inside the housing. However, do as I say, not as I do. I'm going to do it, but that's because I trust myself enough to know I'm not going to damage anything. I'm not going to melt anything, right?

[00:20:27]But you might. So just don't just don't risk it. I've done this hundreds of times. I know what I'm doing. Sort of.

[00:20:35]So I've removed the battery.

[00:20:37]Everything's disconnected.

[00:20:43]Pin one is in the correct place on this.

[00:20:52]Let's move this out the way so we don't melt that.

[00:21:18]That's partially soldered.

[00:21:20]I'm going to drop my air flow down to 10%.

[00:21:27]Press down on that.

[00:21:29]Make sure we got a nice connection.

[00:21:38]And then I'm going to refly once more.

[00:22:10]Good stuff.

[00:22:17]All right. Before we go any further, I'm just going to test this. So my red probe on the source and the black probe on drain. We get open line.

[00:22:33]Open line on the gate.

[00:22:36]Black probe on source point 4. Good. Excellent. What about there? Open. Okay. What about this one?

[00:22:46]04.

[00:22:49]Open. Yeah. Okay, that's reading absolutely perfectly. So, yeah, this is an end channel MOSFET. Obviously, we have to make sure we get the correct one uh before we do anything. But, uh yeah, let's just give this a quick test. Let's make sure it doesn't blow up on us. So, plug the RTC in first, plug the battery in, and then finally a charger.

[00:23:14]Okay, we don't get any magic smoke.

[00:23:20]There is something rattling around inside here, but I'm not sure what that is. Could have been dropped at some point.

[00:23:35]Okay, so we're going to get this power cycle again like we did last time because we've taken the RTC out. So, it's got to retrain itself or whatever it does. But that's fine. We'll give it a minute. Okay, it's booting up. It's not crashing. It's not shutting down on its own anymore. Good stuff. So, I do need to give this a full stress test.

[00:23:55]Obviously, that's going to take a few hours, so I'm not going to do that on video. However, this laptop is now working. I also need to figure out what's rattling around. It's probably a broken clip or something, but I'll just take the fans off, clean it off camera, and I'll find whatever is rattling around. It sounds like a little piece of plastic or something. So, it's probably a clip. It might have been dropped at some point, but yeah, the laptop is working. Happy happy days. We're currently on 93% battery, so it is definitely charging a battery. Uh I am going to just make sure it gets to 94% before I call this completely good. But uh yeah, obviously we've changed a MOSFET since then. We need to make sure it's actually working and whatnot. So I know it's not the same MOSFET. I know it's not the, you know, the exact model number. that doesn't matter as long as it's suitable. So, what's likely going to be in this is going to be a 30 volt MOSFET, uh X amount of amps, whatever.

[00:24:50]You know, it's exactly the same as where I pulled off that circuit on the other laptop. And they are similar spec machines as well. Um although that one's AMD and this one's Intel, but yeah, it doesn't really matter as long as they are similar MOSFET uh similar uh similar specifications on the MOSFETs. It's pretty much there just for redundancy.

[00:25:09]There's obviously four on that circuit.

[00:25:10]Four or five on that circuit. So, you know, it's just there to offset some of the load on the MOSFETs and, you know, actually allow it to handle the kind of load that it needs, the kind of current that it needs to go through. Because an N channel MOSFET, it needs to allow uh you know, high amounts of current at a low voltage, which is the opposite way to the way P channel MOSFETs work. I think I'm not 100%. I'm not an engineer.

[00:25:35]That's just gone to 94%. Excellent.

[00:25:37]Fantastic. Yeah.

[00:25:38]>> So, that is working absolutely fine.

[00:25:41]Yeah, this laptop is now fixed. Uh, yeah. But, uh, anyway, that's going to be for this video. Thank you very much for watching. Let me know what you think down in the comment section down below.

[00:25:49]If you need to organize a repair, get in touch at the coded repair. And if you need parts and supplies for your repair, you can buy those online store at console fix.shop. As always, don't forget to subscribe for um, you know, similar content to this. I don't just work on games consoles, I do laptops and stuff as well. So, if you want to see more more of this sort of stuff, just hit the subscribe button, turn on the bell notifications, all of that good stuff. Um, yeah. Again, I'm going to say I don't recommend changing components while it's inside the housing. Like I said, I've done it hundreds of times, and I would take full responsibility if I did damage anything. I've never damaged anything doing it, but I just still don't recommend it. But anyway, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you all in the next video. Take care everyone. Bye for now.