Won't charge, I may be screwed :(

[Joe]

Hey guys,

Wife and I were out of town, and I brought my i7 Stylus as my only computer. Realized I forgot my charger! Picked up a universal 12v 2.5A charger from Radio Shack (*shutter*), and thought I was good to go, as the red charge LED came on, and Windows said it was charging. Left it for a few hours “charging”, only to see it hadn’t gained any charge, but gone down a bit. I thought maybe the original charger was higher amperage (which I verified to be incorrect when we got home, and found the original charger is 2A). While still travelling, I powered down the tablet completely and left it plugged in, thinking maybe it didn’t have enough output to charge and run at the same time. still no luck.

Then I made what I think was my fatal mistake: I thought possibly the polarity was reversed, so I switched the polarity on the universal charger tip, and when plugging it back in ‘spark!’, and tablet shut down. oops!! crap!! So i switched the polarity back, plugged in, red LED came on (whew, I thought), and the tablet powered on normally.

Finally, we got home, and I plugged it back in to the original charger, but I now get no charge LED, and the tablet won’t turn on at all. The last time I had it powered on, it was down to 17%, so I supposed it was completely drained by now. After leaving it plugged in to the original charger overnight, still no joy. seems completely dead.

I opened it up, hoping to find a visibly burned out surface mount resistor, etc, but after carefully examining both sides of the motherboard, I find nothing. Re-assembled, made sure the battery connector is properly seated, and still no joy. No charge LED, no powering on.

I feel like I may be out of luck here. Anyone have any suggestions? Beyond the pinhole reset button next to the power button, is there any other ‘reset’ that I may have missed?

[Tizian Amir Naim]

I’m in the exact same boat as you.

Already posted about it 2 weeks ago. No replies as of yet.

Sorry that I can’t help you out, just wanted to let you know that you’re not alone with this problem.

 

As far as I know the i7 Stylus utilizes two battery packs.

Maybe we could go about replacing those, since the originals seem to be completely busted from changing the polarity.

[Joe]

I ended ordering a used one from eBay, which should be arriving today. I guess on the up-side, I will have two keyboard docks, two chargers, and a ‘parts bin’ of the fried tablet to scavenge parts from if there’s any further issues down the road.

I will keep tinkering with the fried one and let you know if I figure anything out. Since you mentioned the batteries, I think i’ll pull them out and test them on my bench-top lithium battery charger, to see if they are working. I suppose it’s possible there is an internal protection fuse wired in the pack that I need to find. Probably wishful thinking 🙂

 

[Author]

Posts