I once told a room mate in college I would repair their laptop's charging port if they were willing to pay more per month on 50 megabit internet (this was a lot of bandwidth back then).
I ordered a new port online, waited for it to come, then spent like 12 hours trying to get the factory solder out of the original port. I ended up accidentally frying part of the power board. By this time it was the middle of the night and I had class the next day, and my room mate expected a working laptop in the morning.
So I started trawling Craigslist for similar laptop models, emailed every single one of them that I would buy the laptop at 6am (enough time before class). I found one with a broken screen, and got a decent deal, I think I still spent $150 or something (almost a whole paycheck at the time). I brought it home and tore it open, took the entire power connector module out of it and into the new one, it fit thankfully.
I handed my room mate her working laptop and never mentioned the ordeal... It was still working 2 years later when I moved out of that house. The problem wasn't so much technical as a problem of desperation and saving face :)
I ordered a new port online, waited for it to come, then spent like 12 hours trying to get the factory solder out of the original port. I ended up accidentally frying part of the power board. By this time it was the middle of the night and I had class the next day, and my room mate expected a working laptop in the morning.
So I started trawling Craigslist for similar laptop models, emailed every single one of them that I would buy the laptop at 6am (enough time before class). I found one with a broken screen, and got a decent deal, I think I still spent $150 or something (almost a whole paycheck at the time). I brought it home and tore it open, took the entire power connector module out of it and into the new one, it fit thankfully.
I handed my room mate her working laptop and never mentioned the ordeal... It was still working 2 years later when I moved out of that house. The problem wasn't so much technical as a problem of desperation and saving face :)