One of the many things that can cause problems to a laptop is the power cord. With a two year old in the house, it’s inevitable that the power cord connection would be damaged. Our power connecter was pushed inside the laptop to the point that we could no longer attach the power cord.

To fix this problem I decided it was time to open the computer and find a way to rig the connector back to the proper location. I started to take out screws. I thought I had every necessary screw removed but I still couldn’t open up the laptop. So, I searched and found this web page: http://www.irisvista.com/tech/laptops/Toshiba-Satellite-A505/removing-optical-drive-1.htm. The instructions there are fairly accurate. However, I’m going to point out a few key differences. Perhaps Toshiba made some changes between the version torn down there and mine.

1) If you are just removing the optical drive, you need to remove on screw on the bottom cover. Unfortunately, I did this last night and don’t recall which screw it was, the screw is about six inches in from the side of the computer. There’s two screws about an inch and a half from each other, removing one of those screws will allow the optical drive to be removed.

2) To remove the top cover, you will have to remove the optical drive first. With the bottom cover up, you will find 3 holes on the left side of the cover with the optical drive removed you will find 3 screws, remove those screws.

3) After removing the keyboard, there are 3 other cables you need to remove, one of them is the touch pad cable, to remove this cable, flip the black bar up to the right. Then pull the cable by the blue tab.

Once you have everything disconnected you should be able to remove the top cover.

I found that the power connecter was somewhat thought out. They did not solder the connecter directly to a circuit board. This is good because that means you will not need to replace a circuit board and probably don’t need to solder anything. They also left some space directly behind the connecter so when it gets pushed back, it does not damage anything. It was easy for me to put the connecter back where it belongs. Thankfully, none of the plastic that holds it in place was severely damaged.

Finally, I put everything back together and began putting the 20 screws back into the bottom of the laptop. After figuring out how the touch pad connecter works, I was able to fire up the laptop and everything worked as expected.