Another laptop fried

MNT Reform
1

Another one bites the dust. Had to leave the house on short notice for a few days this week and left my Reform unplugged and powered on, running the original LPC firmware instead of the latest. Batteries must have gotten overdischarged, because the LPC display was completely unresponsive. Plugged it in, booted, kept it plugged in for a few hours, then finally unplugged it and the laptop immediately went dark. Plugged it in again, hit Circle+B to see the battery and charging status, and it looked like the LPC displayed was being continually refreshed at a high rate, like the flicker of a cheap CRT monitor. Hit Circle+1 and immediately smelled burning electronics. Unplugged and the LPC display went dark again.

To my disappointment, visual inspection of the board doesn’t show anything obviously wrong. No fried traces or fried components, except maybe some discoloration of L1 that could very well just be some natural variation in the coloring of its housing.

2

To me it is really odd that you would have a short that could cause something to burn/melt simply because you let the batteries discharge too low? Unless the battery controller is overheating trying to charge the dead cells.

3

Yeah, I’m at a loss. If I figure anything out, I’ll report back. Unfortunately, though, I don’t expect to have much spare time to sit down with schematics and a multimeter in the weeks/months ahead. :\