Our notebook guru, Steve Yocum, sees a lot of broken power jacks. Most of the time this essential little component breaks from shoving the adapter in the wrong way, tripping over the cord, or moving the notebook while it’s still hooked up. But the problem is that the power jack is placed differently in every model. And replacing it can be very complicated, and expensive.
One day he got in a beautiful gaming notebook that wouldn’t power up properly. Culprit? The power jack. The replacement jack wouldn’t cost much, but the service? The teardown on this custom built piece of hardware was a nightmare. He had to take apart several layers to get to the system board, which was also multilayered. The jack was positioned close to the center on the side of the board. What made it more difficult was that in the last decade, the computer industry moved to leadless solder. This one was stuck in there to stay, which made it really hard to remove the part without breaking the board. 90% of the labor intensive time spent on this case went to this task; it took one person to hold the board at just the right angle, while Steve carefully extracted the jack like an impacted bad molar, in several pieces. Once the old jack was out, and the hole cleaned, the new jack went in nice and easy like a new tooth implant. Once put back together, the computer charged up just like it should.
Moral of the story; take better care of your power jack and charger cord!
Exhibit A: Pieces of broken power jack
