Tuesday, December 11, 2012

LT-2115 Gateway Netbook Teardown!

This began when i thought the USB port on the left side was broken. When i tried to plug in a flash drive, it went partially in at a 35deg angle. In the end i realized that the little piece of plastic in the USB port of this laptop are fairly flexible and if a flash drive (etc) is plugged in upside down, it will sorta go in (as i mentioned before). I pretty much took it apart for no reason and wasted ~2 hours. 

Here are a few pics.
Before, at the Chameleon OS X boot loader.

Prying off the keyboard. Don't worry, the laptop was off, just a test.

Keyboard assembly off.

My tools and the top plate (track pad, keyboard, etc) off of the laptop.

Close Up of laptop in previous image. You can see the motherboard (has vga, usb and power ports) on the left. On right is connector board (more usb, audio, card reader ports). WiFi and bluetooth on bottom right-center.  The blue PCB next to the laptop is the link between the motherboard and secondary board.

The "culprit". Bottom side of motherboard. Fan, memory slot, sata etc.

As i was taking it apart, I looked for some additional ports on the motherboard that i could solder onto and more functionality (USB ports etc) like the eee pc. Sadly, i didn't find any, but found a few things left unsoldered (top left of the motherboard in this pic)

Another here: bottom left.

Shadowy close-up of the connector board!

After i put everything back together ( no extra screws :D), the keyboard didnt work! Turns out i was putting the ribbon cable in wrong. You can see in the pic above that the cable goes below the gray lock-bar, in the rest of the computer, though, the cables went above this lock-bar.

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