My Acer R3 laptop broke last year. I had a look at it today, I had already torn down the battery and repurposed it, but I still had the protection circuitry. I cut off the wires connecting the battery and motherboard and instead connected a 15v DC power supply to the positive and negative terminals. When I connected it, the motherboard drew over 5 amps from the supply, and the voltage dropped to 2 or so volts. Something was obviously broken. (The laptop broke for some unknown reason, when I tore open the battery, the protection circuitry had already kicked in, probably because of the short)
I don't have a thermal camera, so I looked on the motherboard and found an IC near some inductors. I googled the part number, (the markings on it said: BQ 737 - TI 56I - AQ8T (the hyphens represent a new line)). After looking around, I discovered that this was a battery charge controller (Success!). As I said earlier, I don't have a thermal camera, so I connected the power supply once again, and placed my finger on top of the IC. Sure enough, after a few seconds, the IC heated up. (I got the right chip on the first try, I'm not sure why it took me literally a whole year to try this)
Here's my question, will replacing this IC fix the PC? The initial problem was, this laptop randomly just stopped booting after a shutdown, the charging LEDs wouldn't light up when I connected the power adapter. I found this IC on eBay, but the only problem is, (
here's an example) I didn't find an IC that matches the original IC exactly, the ones on eBay say: BQ 737 - TI 25I - ACD8. I'm not sure whether replacing the original chip with this one would work... I'd appreciate some advice on what to do from here.
Thanks