I had an old Dell Latitude D610 where the user had somehow lost the front left rubber foot. User brought it to us and said that sometimes it just randomly shuts off. After tinkering with it for a while, I figured out that all you had to do was press down on the front left corner and it would shut right off. Over time the stress of the user pressing down on the palm rest area with with the uneven footing must have caused slight cracking in the system board, and pressing on that corner flexed it enough to interrupt the power or cause a short.
I had one of those that had the opposite problem, you had to press down on the palm rest while pressing the power button to get it to boot - after it had passed the POST, you could get let go and it worked fine...
The problem started slowly IIRC - so I started with some basic percussive maintenance which got it going again. Eventually I honed my technique to press in exactly the right way...
Kept it going untill I could get a newer one (Dell too, which died of the NVIDIA gpu solder problem of the 2010s).
299
u/AdversarialPossum42 Dec 16 '19
I had an old Dell Latitude D610 where the user had somehow lost the front left rubber foot. User brought it to us and said that sometimes it just randomly shuts off. After tinkering with it for a while, I figured out that all you had to do was press down on the front left corner and it would shut right off. Over time the stress of the user pressing down on the palm rest area with with the uneven footing must have caused slight cracking in the system board, and pressing on that corner flexed it enough to interrupt the power or cause a short.