Acer Extensa 502DX

[shamus]

Listen robin, just pm Damned Angel. He may have exactly what you need. He's the laptop guru around here. And good luck.

Good call Trip
DA is DA Man....

[robinsonra2]

Thanks for the quick response (frankly, I'm a little amazed). I agree about the general value of the Acer, but my daughter has a quirky emotional attachment to it (one of those inherited geek tendencies; I still have my first Apple II+ and it is entirely functional, jacked up to an amazing 128KB of RAM and running Apple Pascal), probably because she never expected such a gift, especially while she was in one of those teenage states that only a parent could see light beyond. Her current machine is a Dell desktop (dude!), which has a few other unique problems (but for which I did recently upgrade video/memory/hard drive/wireless LAN/etc. and dual partitioned for RH9 in addition to XP Pro).

Even if I fix the power connector, no upgrades likely on the Acer, she'll have to stick with Win98 on that antique (unless she wants to make that box a Linux toaster).

Again, thanks for the response.

[Damned Angel]

Let me know which model number it is, I may be able to dig up a manual for it.

[robinsonra2]

[COLOR=Navy][SIZE=4]May have to dig pretty deep, since it's pretty ancient by computer standards, a Acer Extensa 368D. I suspect that other Acer laptops may have similar disassembly requirements, though. The last time I worked on it, I removed the keyboard and all the stuff underneath accessible by removing visible screws, but there appeared to be some a prior tribal knowledge required to get to the power supply area immediately under the display hinge. Maybe a secret incarnation while you poke a long screwdriver into the special hinge release would do the trick...

[Damned Angel]

Ill have to check on monday for a manual as I don't have the paswords for Acer's ASP site at home. They may not have the manual online any more as it is quite old.

You should not have to poke anything to get it to open. If you have already gotten the keyboard off, then usually you are already 1/3 done with older notebooks. Check to see if the palm rest comes off as a seperate piece, if it does, it may be hiding the other screws necessary to remove the top hald of the cover to gain access to the internals.

Most notebooks are just a series of screws that you remove from the bottom. Check to make sure there are no screws hidden under cd-rom's or floppy drives that are easily removed. There may also be some in the battery compartment. Nothing should take too much force to remove, if it feels like it may break if you apply anymore force, it probably will. Double check that there are no more screws, top or bottom, that can be removed.

[robinsonra2]

Thanks! I'll give that a shot next week, since I left the laptop in a storage box at work (reassembled all the components after last try, but will break it down again).

Bob R.

[robinsonra2]

An incantation might work better than an incarnation, but who knows??!?

Thanks! I'll give that a shot next week, since I left the laptop in a storage box at work (reassembled all the components after last try, but will break it down again).

Bob R.