Run AO150 without battery?

I recently acquired an AO150 with a broken screen. However, it won't power up without the battery installed, which seems curious. I want to leave it permanently powered on, but would be worried about leaving the battery in.

I used to run an EEE 701 as a media server without the battery, and I'm currently using an old HP DV9500 sans battery which I stripped down to the mobo and put into a perspex & wood case for DVD ripping:



I'm tossing up whether to do the same thing with this or swap the hdd out for the SSD in my EEE 901 and submerse it in mineral oil for a funky oil cooled file server (external usb drives, natch), but not being able to run without the battery is a bit of a show stopper.

 

Can't help you with the battery problem, but gotta say that's an AWESOME mod. I've seen the mineral oil trick before, great idea.

Try powering it up with the battery and A/C connected, then pull the battery after it's POST'ed. See if it continues to function then.

 

Thanks!

Tried it - it just powers off. I was wondering if there's a physical switch or whether there's a couple of contacts I can short to fool the device into thinking there's a battery attached?

 

Sounds to me like the 150 you bought had a little more damage than just a broken screen. As far as I'm aware, there's no physical switch to tell the machine when there's a battery inserted, that's what the chip on the battery itself does, sort of.

The only thing i can think of, is a busted relay or other circuit on the motherboard in the charging circuitry. Have a close look for burned or broken resistors etc. It could also be your power adapter, the brick itself could be throwing out too little voltage to run the machine, but may be putting out enough so that when the battery is connected, it outputs a similar lower voltage to the battery. Is the charge lead a proper AAO lead?

 

Could well be - i got it for free, the previous owner kicked it and broke the bottom right of the screen. It's an official charger - it could be physical damage, it's the only laptop I've known to not run without the battery. I'll check out the mobo. Can any other 150 user try running without the battery and let me know?

 

Doh! Dodgy power supply - a tear in the cable. Problem solved! :lol:

 

Cool as, I thought it might be somethign like that. Keep us posted, I'd like to put your mod up on our wiki as an example if you're okay with that. It really shows just how versatile these AAO's can be.

 

OK, no worries, will do. I'll try & do somekind of step by step pics as well. Not sure when I'll be able to do it though (damn job gets in the way and have to do 'work' sometimes)...

Can't claim any glory though, I got the idea from this post on eeeuser. Almost did it to a 701 but ended up selling it instead. I stripped down the HP laptop as it had that dodgy-solder-holding-the-GPU problem on a lot of HP laptops from a couple of years back. Tried reflowing it by blasting it with a hairdryer (I am Mr Low-tech) but no joy. I've thought about sticking it in the oven (there's plenty of info on reflowing in you kitchen oven on the net) but since I actively use it to rip DVDs (instead of burning KWs using my 'proper' PC) I don't want to risk it.

Anyway, back OT. The 701 in the above link uses thicker perpsex and metal standoffs. However, I like to do things on the cheap, at zero cost if possible. So, I took the perspex from a large picture frame I had in the loft and cut two peices roughly the same size as ther stripped laptop. I then bought a 3ft rod of dowelling (about £1.50) and made standoffs to hold the mobo away from the back perpex sheet (since the mobo isn't flat, I had to keep filing the standoffs to get each one the right height). I stuck a couple of sheets of A4 to the back sheet and marked points where the improvised standoffs would be screwed to the mobo, then drilled 1mm holes in the sheet. I then drilled 1mm pilot holes about 2mm deep in each end of the standoffs, and reused the longer case screwes to fix the mobo to the back sheet (haveing removed the paper, of course). I then made 6 longer standoffs to screw the front sheet to the back sheet, drilled the holes in the sheets and ends of the large standoffs and fixed it all together. Because the sheets of perspex I used where really thin, it wouldn't stand up on it's own, so I basically cut some oblongs of wood (from one of a bunch of pine bed slats also hoarded in the loft), glued them together so the whole thing just slots over the top, then varnished it (found in my shed). You can't see them in my rubbish photos, but there's also some standoffs and mounting tape stopping the drives from falling off the mobo.

I'm guessing the AO150 will be much easier, since it's smaller and the mobo is much more uniform. Also the drive is in a caddy, so I shouldn't need to hold it up. Speakers seem to be in the bottom (rather than the lid, like the EEEs or in a bar screwed to the case like the HP) so I should be able to keep the sound, too.

My wife hates it, my kids love it. Now I have the backing of aspireoneuser - awesome! :lol:

 

haha and we have 35654 users, I'm sure most of us would like your mod too, LOLs power in numbers :mrgreen:

 

Sometimes the battery thing is just the bios. I updated my bios and now my battery charges fine. Something was screwed up in my bios but the bios update that I got fixed it, and now the battery charges fine. Look for a bios update from Acer, and see if that works.