Info Fix for Bad Power Jack on Acer Chromebooks

[ergillma]

I recently purchased a lot of 20 Acer C731 Chromebooks on ebay. I noticed right away that most of them had intermittent opens when the AC adapter/charger was plugged into the jack. I tried messing around with the jacks but nothing seemed to help. Replacing the jacks would cost about $10 per Chromebook, so instead I cut off the jacks and hard-wired the AC adapters directly to the cables that connect to the motherboards. Each cable had 5 wires - 2 red, 2 black, and one green. The black and green wires were both connected to the black (negative) wire from the charger, and the red wires were connected to the white (positive) wire. Worked like a charm!

 

[Lutfij]

You essentially removed the option of mobility from the mobile computing device by hard wiring the adapter/power brick to the Chromebook's motherboard.

What you've done won't allow your mobile computing device's battery to charge and discharge like normal. If you want to do the latter, you're going to have to reach for the wall outlet or the switch off of which the adapter is tethered to. Initially you'd need to disconnect from the adapter even when the adapter is tethered to the wall outlet. One other thing that will happen is due to the adapter being an appendage(now) will cause the adapter wire to be wrapped around the Chromebook, over time, will cause the connection made to the laptop to deteriorate. Even if they were soldered, the wires leading out of the laptop will deteriorate.

$10 per Chromebook to retain an OEM look and functionality, not to mention adding to the prospect of resale value, is actually priceless.