Hi, hope I'm posting this question in the right forum, been a long time since I've been on daniweb. Anyway, on to the issue: I'm working on my cousins laptop (HP G71), which won't power on, with the battery plugged in, charger and battery connected, or with charger and no battery. I'm thinking that it's the power jack. I took the laptop apart down to where I could access the power jack, and now I'm stuck. I got a voltmeter and checked the voltage from the charger and it was fine, then I plugged in the removed power jack and stuck a straightened staple into the pin holes, one coming from the red wire and the other from the black (it's a 6 pin connector), then touched the leads to their respective colors and it showed the same voltage as the charger itself, so now I'm stuck. I'm not sure if it could still be the jack now or what it could be. To verify thorough I hooked everything back up after this and still nothing. This one's got me a bit stumped, so any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
The power circuitry in the laptop may be bad. Often it is caused by damaged capacitors. See if you can see any that seem swollen or leaking electrolyte. This is the most common cause of this sort of failure. Repair isn't hard, but you need really good soldering skills to replace the caps. Myself, I would not try (I am a fair-to-middling solderer) - I'd take it into a repair depot or preferably send it to HP for repair. At least that way the repairs will be waranteed.
Just took it back down and looked, the capacitors all looked perfect, no swelling and the area around each looked clean. In fact the whole board looks nearly pristine.
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