Fixing a broken laptop & replacing those obscure parts

Recently I discovered my laptop stopped working, it had been a month or so since I last powered it up as I had been playing around lately with Minix in VMWare on my work laptop, so playing with Gentoo on my other laptop had regrettably taken a back seat. How I regret my neglect now.

The thing that really annoyed me about the problem was that it was a laptop & I couldn't simply pull open the case to the laptop & put in some spares from other machines I have lying about to find out where the problem lay - no manufacturer would ever dream of making a laptop that friendly :(, so I had to try & reason logically what could be wrong. Given that it simply would not turn on the problem had to lie between the power supply & the power button itself. The fact that the transformer on the power supply still glowed a healthy green indicated it wasn't going to be something as simple as the power supply being broken (plus I could detect current going through it using a volt meter).

Obviously this left me with no choice but to take the laptop apart & hopefully work our what was wrong. Take it apart I did, I had to remove every single component off the laptop (damn you Acer) in order to get underneath the motherboard & discover what was wrong.

Turns out that the pin in the DC socket on the motherboard had broken, how on earth this happened I cannot fathom. But it did leave me scratching my head thinking where I could get it replaced from. Tried the usual suspects - Maplin, Farnell & RS components for an exact match to no avail. Then I googled for a bit & found my saviour www.laptopsockets.co.uk

This site seems to contain all those small & obscure spare parts that you need to fix your laptop & they have the exact DC socket I need. Granted there is a slight premium on the part (which should cost < £1), £15 including P&P, but I'm happy as I can fix my laptop & can be certain its the exact replacement I need.

Plus I feel I'm no longer at the mercy of a laptop manufacturer to fix problems with it, where all you actually need is a random part, & some solder.

@misc{svensson2007-fixing-broken-laptop-replacing-those,
  author = {Conor Svensson},
  title = {{Fixing a broken laptop \& replacing those obscure parts}},
  year = {2007},
  month = jan,
  url = {https://conorsvensson.com/archive/blogspot/fixing-broken-laptop-replacing-those/}
}