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hpr2081 :: Fixing my daughter's laptop

My daughter broke the headphone jack in her laptop. I tried to get the remains out

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Hosted by Dave Morriss on Monday, 2016-07-25 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
laptop, repair, audio jack, Dremel, USB DAC. 5.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr2081

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Duration: 00:11:09

general.

Fixing my daughter’s laptop

My daughter is a student at university and uses her laptop with a headset most of the time. She shares a flat with a friend and they are both studying, so they don’t want to annoy each other with noise.

The headset my daughter uses has a very long cable and earlier this year she tripped over it. The microphone jack was OK, but the headphone jack snapped off at the first ring and the remaining piece was left in the socket.

This episode is about my attempt to remove the broken piece of the jack plug. To find out more about the method I used and how successful it was see the full notes with pictures by clicking this link.

Note: The Amazon links below are for information. I have no financial involvement with Amazon; these are not Affiliate links.

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Comment #1 posted on 2016-07-26 07:28:33 by 0xf10e

Nice work!

:D

Comment #2 posted on 2016-08-07 15:01:12 by Alpha32

Brilliant!

Well done, Mr Morriss! I'm constantly breaking things, so this one is getting bookmarked.

Comment #3 posted on 2016-08-07 15:50:33 by Dave Morriss

I hope it never happens to you!

Thanks for the comments.

One thing I don't think I said was that I ensured the drill bit protruded from the Dremel only far enough to get about 2mm from the base of the hole. I had visions of wrecking the laptop if I accidentally drilled into some other component.

If I had to do this again I'd drill as far as I could, then I might try gluing a cocktail stick or thin nail into the hole in the plug with cyanoacrylate/CA/super-glue. I'd use the gel type so it didn't drip all over the place and make the problem worse though.

Comment #4 posted on 2016-08-07 20:01:21 by Jonathan Kulp

I'm in the Same Boat

The exact same thing happened on my daughter's laptop about 2 months ago. I still have not retrieved the tiny bit of headphone jack from inside the laptop. Our solution was to use a $10 USB audio adapter I had lying around for just such occasions when the audio goes belly-up on one of our computers. She's using that now and seems happy enough.

Comment #5 posted on 2016-08-07 20:49:08 by Dave Morriss

Thanks for the hint Jon!

Hi Jon,

My daughter had actually survived perfectly well with the adapter of the sort you recommended to me during the semester. Thanks for alerting me to these devices by the way!

I wanted to fix the audio jack problem because I thought the USB device was mechanically vulnerable, since it sticks out a moderate amount. My son destroyed a dual port on his laptop many years ago in an accident involving a large USB stick, so I have always regarded laptop USB ports as fragile.

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