Aargh!! Stupid laptop might be dead... any ideas??

A common problem on a lot of modern electronic equipment is that the soldered joints to the printed-circuit board are the only thing which is physically holding the socket in place, which means that they are placed under stress every time you insert or remove the plug, and eventually the joints start to fail.

It's cheap, shoddy construction, but it saves the manufacturer a penny per unit or something equally silly compared to designing it properly and having connectors securely mounted to a chassis or the case.

That was the basis for at least one of the (attempted) class action suits. The legal claim was that under the guise of cutting costs, the manufacturers were setting the product up for failure, which they would then be hired to repair at an exorbitant rate.

The repair I did was following instructions for a 'piggy-tail' plug. You add a bit of wire to the components, so the socket is an inch or so outside the case and resultantly gets less stress on the connections. Doesn't do much for any sleek laptop aesthetics, but seemed to work a bit better than what Compaq did...

The repair I did was following instructions for a 'piggy-tail' plug. You add a bit of wire to the components, so the socket is an inch or so outside the case and resultantly gets less stress on the connections.

Definitely going to be better than the original.  I've done similar things on TVs, digiboxes etc. by drilling and fitting a chassis-mount socket to the casing and connecting it to the board by flying leads.  It takes very little more time than simply replacing the original component and will be vastly superior.   Unfortunately, laptops can be a little tight on space!

Well, the first place we took the laptop (see my OP) did look at the DC port and said it 'looked' fine. But all the symptoms indicate that is indeed the problem (i.e. wiggling cord to get power, etc).

We phoned another place. It'll cost us 100 quid to get fixed. This guy tells us that they replace these things on every make of laptop. If I had a soldering iron, I'd probably try to do it myself.

But now the screen keeps going funny (stripes) and I have to restart. Now I'm worried the first place jiggled something when they took it apart that is affecting the display.

Gah!

My experience was that it went from bad to worse very fast. I think it was a matter of the jiggle that broke the laptop's back.

The screen could be related to the power problem. Stripes could be a power surge (or dip), which goes back to the cord having to be in weird positions.

At the same time, though, it could be more serious, especially if the power supply was giving off so much heat it was melting cables.

£100 is about what I'd guessed the going rate would be (and still several hundred less than a new laptop!). It sounds like they're better prepared to deal with the problem than the first one.

Thanks for all your help!

Sorry I'm late seeing this, having internet issues here lately. 

My old Gateway laptop had the same issue you are describing, and here it would have cost me about $180 for the repair, at least that was the lowest I found. I opted to buy another laptop as that one was four years old and essentially outdated. The man at the computer repair store told me they repaired up to thirty laptops a month with the power connection problem and said as was mentioned here, it was on all models.

My sister had the same problem with her laptop a few months after I did, and her husband soldered a new piece on and the computer works perfectly. I believe they found the part and did it themselves for less than $20 and he is not a computer genius by any means. Just a handy husband and they figured they didn't have anything to lose really. I am thinking of having him fix my old one so I can resell it.