A strange thing... Last week a friend gave me an RCA tablet to repair they said it kept freezing up, they bought a new one, "fix it and you can have it" so I said ok, took a look at it, it was rammed full of downloaded apps and yeah it kept freezing up so I factory reset it. It was working like new so I played around with it, I hooked it up to a laptop with Linux on it copied a couple of apps from my phone to the laptop and from the laptop onto the tablet. (couldn't find a cable to direct connect them) So a couple of days later I went to use the laptop, it was dead. No lights no beeps would not power up at all. I thought it must have just wore out. It never occurred to me the tablet or phone had anything to do with it. I used to buy non working laptops on EBay and repair them and resell them until new ones got so cheap it wasn't worth it anymore, so I have a lots of laptop parts. I knew I had a working motherboard for that laptop model. So yesterday I stripped down that laptop, replaced the motherboard. I didn't put the hard drive in it yet, or the network cards but I tested it with a Ubuntu Linux CD. It powered up and booted off the CD just fine. So it happened. The next day, (today) I decided to copy some more stuff from my phone to the tablet. Still couldn't find a mini USB to mini USB cable so I did the same as before, used the laptop which was still conveniently on the table running the Linux live CD. I did that and left their tablet hooked up to the laptop as it was charging off the USB. I went to get the tablet about an hour ago it was only charged to 68%. Laptop looked like it had switched off. Of course it had done a lot more than just switch off it is as dead as a doornail !! Again!! No power up, no lights no beeps no sign of life at all. So this time, with a different motherboard, no hard drive and no network hardware installed, I can only see three possible suspects, 1) Ubuntu live CD (unlikely candidate) 2) My Android Phone 3) The Android Tablet Anyone heard of anything like this before?
Hmmmm yeah, the cable doesn't appear to be faulty but I'll test it tomorrow, do you think a USB fault could take out the motherboard though? I used the same cable to connect the phone as I did the tablet mounted and unmounted the phone, copied files across without any sign of a fault, but I did leave the tablet charging... You think letting it charge off the laptops USB might have burned it out? I don't have any more throwaway computers to test it on, I'm kinda scared to hook it up to anything else lol.
I'd just toss that USB cable, just in case. If you don't need the tablet now, just put it aside until you have a throwaway PC to test it with. With older PCs, I gather that a shorted USB connector or cable can burn out motherboards.
Well I can still use the tablet I just won't hook it up to any more PC's. I can use SD card as a file transfer device. The more I think about it the more I think you're right about it. I bet I left the tablet charging off the laptop the first time too. I must have because they didn't give me the charger for it. So either the cable is faulty, or the tablet was trying to pull more amps than the laptop could provide without burning something out. I'm going to check the cable and disassemble the laptop again tomorrow.
Yes I have several USB type phone chargers I've been using them. The tablet is still working fine, I'll probaly find another motherboard for the old HP laptop at some point.
