On 4/20/2010 9:05 PM, A Different Al wrote:
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?-



Yep, you are absolutely right. HPaq is right up there in the running
for the championship of failed laptop power jacks. Fighting it out with
Dell and Acer-eGateMachines for market share.

The fix at the design level is idiot simple. Add some sort of collar
around the power jack and bolt the jack to the motherboard.

I won't even count how many laptops with hosed power jacks I've
encountered. Dell resolved a class action lawsuit about power jacks and
other failures in its Inspiron 5100 series. I have a client with a
now-venerable Inspiron 5150. Her son accidentally yanked the power cord
or tripped over it, and the motherboard was toast. Luckily, I had a
working spare in the chassis, so the repair was easy, swapping stuff
from old to new chassis.

The biggest causes of laptop failure are the power jack, the hard drive
(dropping the laptop, especially when running), and heat (usually caused
by clogged ventilation ducts, but sometimes by ****-poor design as with
nVidia graphics).

In the previous presidential administration, looking out for consumer
interests was non-existent. Not sure how this administration or the
consumer affairs group of a state govt would respond. There are always
the lawyers with their many teeth, class action lawsuits, plenty of $$$
for the lawyers, ludicrous settlements, and next to nothing for members
of the class action.

Sixty Minutes? Some other TV investigative reporting? National
Enquirer? Letters to your congressmen? Problem is that I have not kept
really good records of make, model, date failure encountered, date
laptop shipped. Whether a lawyer, the govt, or investigative reporter,
they need hard facts... Ben Myers