Does anyone know how to replace a power supply in an HP Pavilion ZT3380 laptop please?
The power plug seems to be exceptionally loose and if the computer shuts down, you can occasionally get it turned on again by turning the plug around in the socket 180 degrees so that something makes contact with something again. But I don't think this is the whole story.
The computer does work as a desktop but once it did shut down overnight for no apparent reason and once during use while I was trying to soak-test it for this very problem. When it shut down overnight, by the morning, when I turned it on, the orange charge light having presumably been on all night, it showed 0% charge. Suspicious.
More importantly it shuts down completely if you accidentally jiggle the plug, not going to battery power at all. In addition, when you start it with a largely dead battery and then try to plug it in to charge the battery, the battery doesn't charge at all. It CAN also show an orange charge light overnight when off and by the morning, show no increase in charge: This doesn't just seem to be a loose plug!
I upgraded the BIOS and this seemed to improve things for a very short while, with the new BIOS having a battery calibration utility which worked once. However, now it wont even charge the System Battery except excruciatingly slowly. Isn't the system battery something like a rechargeable CR2025? Which should discharge/charge in a few minutes. When the battery utility did discharge/recharge the main battery, it did do it in around a half an hour.
We HAVE tried changing the AC adapter in case the problem was with the internal wiring of the plug itself and isolated that as not being the issue.
Someone once referred me to a service manual for my Pavilion 5415 which had a similar problem but I cant now find the reference to it (and replacing the power supply for the 5415 involved a completely uneconomical taking apart of the whole computer down virtually to the last screw!). These internal power supplies do occasionally come up on ebay and sell for a few bucks. possibly for this reason?
Hopefully the situation wont be the same for the 3880? Though an alarming number of them seem to come up very cheaply at places like Fry's, - reconditioned .
(Incidentally it refers to itself on its screen panel as a ZT3000, on its underside as a ZT3300 and on it serial number plate as a ZT3380US)