Dell L702x: Replaced the power jack successfully

[dictum9]

There is a number of youtube videos that go over this procedure step by step... observations:

1. Label the screws when you take them out where they came from. I spent 15 minutes trying different screws in wrong places as I put them in a pile more or less and by the time I had to assemble them, forgot what came from where. Using long screws when I should have used shorter ones and vice-versa. And even being relatively careful, I still managed to lose one tiny screw.

2. The biggest PITA was the wi-fi card connections. Tiny wires with tiny little metal thingies. Took me 5 minutes to align them. I thought I would snap something and break off that little metal thing at the end and end up with no wi-fi.

3. The replacement power jack from Dell (OEM) seems to be the same piece of shyte that the original was. It does kind of work but I think it will disintegrate in 6 months like the original. The design plainly sucks.

Other than that, went smooth. It's the first time I had the laptop apart. Upon the bootup, the wi-fi icon was missing strangely enough, I had to disable it / renable it and reboot and something worked.

 

[1shado1]

Congrats on doing the repair yourself! I did the same thing on my son's friend's laptop. Don't recall the brand, but the problem with the jack was the weak plastic housing that was supposed to hold the jack in place. The new jack was just as flimsy looking as the old one, and was sure to break again in a few months. My cure was to bury the new jack in 2-part epoxy before reassembling the laptop. The repair lasted another 4 years until he purchased a new laptop. Chances are the jack is still working if someone else is still using that laptop.