This topic was broached in 2005 and, as the poster feared, it "died on
the vine."

Never one to take a hint, I want to revive it.

Laptop power jacks are *-_DESIGNED_-* to fail!

Every one I've ever seen has a 4-5cm long stiff crowbar of a power plug
that jams into a flimsy jack that's more-or-less soldered directly to
the PC board inside. Stresses from slight movements of the power cord
are amplified by this absurdly long lever and inevitably break the jack,
and, if the manufacturer really lucks out, the motherboard it's attached
to; the connection lasts a little longer than the manufacturer's
warrantee. It's designed to be fiendishly difficult to repair.

Compaq/HP are the offenders I'm thinking of, but I'll bet it's
industry-wide

If cars were so obviously designed to fail, lawyers would descend like
starving pterodactyls. There would be recalls, free repairs, and
compensatory and punitive damages enabling lawyers to pay for the
orthodontia required by their children's many rows of teeth.

Why, then, do we tolerate this from the laptop makers? And how can we
get them, after all this time, to- stop?-