My ongoing eeePC "3G mod" adventure

Since last night, I had the doubtful joy of having to re-solder two pins of my extra miniPCIe socket (I accidentally dropped my eee from ~50cm heigth and afterwards the 3G card wouldn't work anymore, which was pretty annoying since I need internet access - so I had to re-open the whole apparatus and take apart everything, leading to the lucky discovery of only said two loose pins as a cause for the malfunction), I will take this as an opportunity to give you the gentle reader some more details about the inner workings of how I did this modification (there may exist better ways I must admit, specifically for securing the modem card in place). That being said, you will surely remember that there's an old and well known (and true!) proverb saying "A picture sometimes tells more than a thousand words"...

So here are some pictures.



Here's a picture showing my Sierra MC8775 3G modem card inserted and secured down with stiff wire (soldered to the motherboard and bent around the cards edges firmly) (the red stuff is just to hide my IMEI to avoid abuse of it)


this nice and very professional(!) drawing of mine served me well when I had to check for contact between SIM slot and miniPCIe socket (and it also served well as a drip mat for my coffee cup, as you can see by the brown circular stains it left). All SIM slot pins except "pin 2/GND" are wired to the smaller side of the connector, and contrary to this art piece of a wiring schematic, "pin 4/VPP" is not connected on the eeePC motherboard at all (soldering them is not needed). I hope you can still decipher it when you click on it to enlarge!


Now my 3G card is working again, and I'm happy again too.
I think I applied enough solder this time too to prevent further similar incidents.