Big Brain Time: Laptop USB-C Power Delivery Bypass / Repair

HeinrichHoell · March 10, 2021

So... A user at my office dropped his laptop square on the USB-C charger whilst plugged in. So naturally, the laptop no longer charges. Well kinda, if i leave it plugged in for like a week it gets to around 30%. I have inspected and replaced the charger and cable itself. No change. I stripped the laptop and physically inspected the port, connectors and double checked all connectors leading to and from the battery. No visible damage. I then sent the laptop to a repair center. They quoted R13 000.00 for a motherboard replacement. This is R5 000.00 short of the laptop's value so the company decided to rather buy a replacement and allowed me to take it for myself.

It's a Lenovo ThinkPad E590 (i7, 16GB RAM, 500GB M.2 and not too bad at all if I can hack-fix it myself.

So if you are skilled enough to help me on this, I would REALY appreciate the assist. It has been a while since I had the opportunity to have a decent-ish system at home.

So the way I see it, there are two options. One is to try and fix the charging fault itself and Two is to bypass the problem completely.

Fixing the charging gives me 3 challenges. The first is to isolate where the issue is. Now I watched some videos on YouTube and it looks like the "handshake" might be at fault due to the charging happening but never ramping up to full throttle. Is that a physical chip that I can replace, repair or bypass? And how do I know if that is the location of the fault? Then, how do I fix it. Some next level fine soldering I presume but i'm up for the task. Or maybe a way to charge the battery by bypassing the port and board entirely whilst having the laptop running off it? Even if it would then need to be a fixed cable, at least I keep the ability to charge it and run it off the battery. Like a PC on a UPS.

Bypassing the problem completely also sounds like a possibility even if I would lose the portability of a laptop. I'm talking about powering the laptop board directly without going through the battery. In this case I would probably end up building it into my desk as a silent Small Form Factor hidden PC and make the screen like a pop-out monitor. So if this is the only way, can I power the board directly? And how do I go about it?

Please comment if you know something about this stuff so I don't ruin my chances with this laptop.