Rebuilding an old friend
Back in late 2013 - I purchased a Dell Venue 8 Pro - Model 5830 to experiment with what MS called at the time Sub 10 sized PCs. The Venue 8 had gotten pretty good reviews and with an Intel Atom Z3740 CPU, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of Storage, Touch and Pen, Cameras, SD and Wifi - felt it would be a good portable device for flights and testing since it could run full x86 Windows.
The little guy has hung in there very well. Starting life as a Windows 8.1 device - I joined the Windows 10 Insider Program for it and it has supported every update so far through the Redstone 4 branch. It had good battery life - often 6 - 7 hours and could play music and movies well enough.
But last month I ran into an issue that I thought may have been the end of my little device. I had picked it up from desk desk and was working at the couch when I noticed that the screen was flexed and bulging and had in fact started to separate from the back casing.
The cause was a failed battery. It had swollen about 4 - 5 times its normal thickness put pressure on the touch screen from behind pushing it away from it's casing.
Okay I thought - let's see if we can find a new battery, swap it out and be back in business. So off to Amazon and yep several vendors sold "new" replacement batteries. So I chose a vendor and had a battery on the way - all for about $25.
But of course it wouldn't be that easy. The first and biggest problem was getting the back case off and the old battery out.
Even with pry tools it wasn't going to be easy. And in fact it wasn't - as I tried to remove the back - all of a sudden I heard a small crunching sound and the screen had cracked under the pressure of the swollen battery.
Crap....
So now to find a screen - and not just any screen - but a 1200 x 800 touch & pen support screen for a device that Dell stopped making in 2015. Dell themselves didn't sell one - but luckily was able to find a refurbished one online for less than $100 from a reputable Dell parts store. - Okay problem solved right...
Nope...
So the replacement battery and new screen arrived and I sat down and disassembled the 5830. The screen "assembly" itself acts the mount point for the motherboard and battery - so after removing a handful of screws, some ribbon cables and peripherals like the bottom speaker - I was able to discard the cracked screen, attach my motherboard, cables, etc install the new battery and reattach the back cover.
Then I plugged it in and saw the small white LED that indicates charging and I thought okay - let's give it an hour or so to allow the battery to fully charge and we'll be okay... Ehhh...nope...
When I returned and pressed the power button that same LED flashed Red for 2 seconds indicating low or no charge. So I unplugged and replugged the USB charger and the white LED came back on - hmmmm.... Houston we have a problem.
What I then noticed that is that the white LED only came on about 1 minute then went off. So does that mean fully charged ? - Press the power button though and red light. remove the USB cable - press power - and nothing no LED - no start-up - no nothing...
Okay - so now you start down the troubleshooting path - is my charger bad ? - okay connect to a different power source - same issue.. Is it the new battery ?- maybe - could it be the charging controller on the motherboard died and was what caused the issue in the first place - also a good maybe.
But how do you troubleshoot with out additional parts. Yes I have electrical test tools - but it's really difficult to track down the exact source of the issue - especially when some of the circuitry is shielded and you then have to remove that shielding to try and test...
Okay - so now comes buying more parts - first another battery ($25) from a different source and second a refurbished motherboard ($64) to eliminate the potential of a bad charging circuit.
So at the end of the day it was a bad replacement battery. Once I got a good one - everything fired up fine and in fact my little Venue Pro 8 is running 17115.1 rs_release just fine thank you and the battery charged up fully in about 2 hrs.
I still have some work with the touch screen however - even though I've run and reset touch and pen calibration several times - the replacement screen is still not as accurate as my original which is a bummer and may ultimately be the end of the Venue if I can't get it to work close to normal.
I also may hack around a little with the replacement motherboard as it is a WWAN version - albeit only LTE 3G - but a nice to have when trying to do a last minute or remote download. The Venue was in fact an Always Connected PC before there were Always Connected PCs.
Anyway - nice to have the old friend back - hopefully will get the touch and pen calibration right and I can wring a couple of more Windows 10 branches out of it.
The little guy has hung in there very well. Starting life as a Windows 8.1 device - I joined the Windows 10 Insider Program for it and it has supported every update so far through the Redstone 4 branch. It had good battery life - often 6 - 7 hours and could play music and movies well enough.
But last month I ran into an issue that I thought may have been the end of my little device. I had picked it up from desk desk and was working at the couch when I noticed that the screen was flexed and bulging and had in fact started to separate from the back casing.
The cause was a failed battery. It had swollen about 4 - 5 times its normal thickness put pressure on the touch screen from behind pushing it away from it's casing.
Okay I thought - let's see if we can find a new battery, swap it out and be back in business. So off to Amazon and yep several vendors sold "new" replacement batteries. So I chose a vendor and had a battery on the way - all for about $25.
But of course it wouldn't be that easy. The first and biggest problem was getting the back case off and the old battery out.
Even with pry tools it wasn't going to be easy. And in fact it wasn't - as I tried to remove the back - all of a sudden I heard a small crunching sound and the screen had cracked under the pressure of the swollen battery.
Crap....
So now to find a screen - and not just any screen - but a 1200 x 800 touch & pen support screen for a device that Dell stopped making in 2015. Dell themselves didn't sell one - but luckily was able to find a refurbished one online for less than $100 from a reputable Dell parts store. - Okay problem solved right...
Nope...
So the replacement battery and new screen arrived and I sat down and disassembled the 5830. The screen "assembly" itself acts the mount point for the motherboard and battery - so after removing a handful of screws, some ribbon cables and peripherals like the bottom speaker - I was able to discard the cracked screen, attach my motherboard, cables, etc install the new battery and reattach the back cover.
Then I plugged it in and saw the small white LED that indicates charging and I thought okay - let's give it an hour or so to allow the battery to fully charge and we'll be okay... Ehhh...nope...
When I returned and pressed the power button that same LED flashed Red for 2 seconds indicating low or no charge. So I unplugged and replugged the USB charger and the white LED came back on - hmmmm.... Houston we have a problem.
What I then noticed that is that the white LED only came on about 1 minute then went off. So does that mean fully charged ? - Press the power button though and red light. remove the USB cable - press power - and nothing no LED - no start-up - no nothing...
Okay - so now you start down the troubleshooting path - is my charger bad ? - okay connect to a different power source - same issue.. Is it the new battery ?- maybe - could it be the charging controller on the motherboard died and was what caused the issue in the first place - also a good maybe.
But how do you troubleshoot with out additional parts. Yes I have electrical test tools - but it's really difficult to track down the exact source of the issue - especially when some of the circuitry is shielded and you then have to remove that shielding to try and test...
Okay - so now comes buying more parts - first another battery ($25) from a different source and second a refurbished motherboard ($64) to eliminate the potential of a bad charging circuit.
So at the end of the day it was a bad replacement battery. Once I got a good one - everything fired up fine and in fact my little Venue Pro 8 is running 17115.1 rs_release just fine thank you and the battery charged up fully in about 2 hrs.
I still have some work with the touch screen however - even though I've run and reset touch and pen calibration several times - the replacement screen is still not as accurate as my original which is a bummer and may ultimately be the end of the Venue if I can't get it to work close to normal.
I also may hack around a little with the replacement motherboard as it is a WWAN version - albeit only LTE 3G - but a nice to have when trying to do a last minute or remote download. The Venue was in fact an Always Connected PC before there were Always Connected PCs.
Anyway - nice to have the old friend back - hopefully will get the touch and pen calibration right and I can wring a couple of more Windows 10 branches out of it.
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