HP laptop dc power jack.....

[rubberman]

after doing a little research i found out HP laptops have serious dc power jack issues. well mine is doing again. first time it was replace by HP under warranty. the pin inside the power jack on the laptop is loose and getting it to charge is a challenge by moving the ac adapter around till it hits. i can get the small power jack off ebay for $9. all i have to do resolder it back on. BUT i dont know how hard it is to access the jack. i do have soldering skills but i wonder if i have to bascially disassemble the whole laptop to get to it. has anyone done this?

[ozymango]

I've done this on a few laptops with coaxial type jacks (I don't screw around with the proprietary multi-pin power connectors that some companies use, I hate those anyway), and it can be done and yeah, you pretty much have to pull the entire thing apart. Without knowing your exact model I can't tell how "buried" the DC jack is, but I'll bet it's like every other machine I've ever worked on -- you'll have to remove literally every single screw to get the motherboard out so you can get to the jack.

It's not really usually very difficult, just very tedious, and you must get a little container to put all the screws in when you take the case apart, or you'll lose them. Trust me, I know this one. From experience.

Also it can help very much to take photos (digital camera comes in very handy) of the laptop as you take it apart, to figure out how it goes back together. Most of the time you can figure it out without pictures, simply because things will only fit in one way ... but still, I take pictures, just in case.

Soldering the jack can be either really simple or impossible, depending on how close it is to other parts. I had a Toshiba laptop where the @#$ jack was right next to a capacitor, like touching-it close, and it was a royal pain to solder that jack without heating up a bunch of other components in the process. So good luck, and if it looks impossible, leave it alone for a day, then come back to it, often that helps figure out the one angle you can reach.

Finally, last but not least, always check your work before you screw the case together (sometimes you have to put the computer pretty much all the way back together to test it, but DON'T screw all the screws back in yet, just critical ones like heat-sink screws). Then, when you know it works, take it all back apart again and use epoxy to glue that @$# jack in place. I epoxy the top, bottom, back, front, basically just coat that jack in epoxy so that it won't physically move again. Mechanical connections on laptops are always the weakest link, so I reinforce the jack. Never had one fail a second time!

Good luck!