Laptop survival tips
We get a lot of laptops coming to us from people who’ve obviously not taken very good care of their computing equipment. There are a number of easy habits to prevent the most common laptop issues.
1) Snapped power connector: This is one of the more common and more expensive causes of laptop failure. A person would lift the front of the laptop and rest the entire weight of the laptop on the power cable. This unfortunately breaks the solder connections of the laptops’ power connector to the motherboard. The symptoms are that the laptop then runs on batteries until it’s depleted and the power adapter charger is unable to charge the laptop. You will also see that the charge light LED that usually shows up when it’s plugged in, does not light up. Also, if you use an another power adapter from another matching laptop, the symptoms are still the same (eliminating the possibility that the adapter is the failure point) . If you are lucky, jiggling or pushing/pulling the connector in a particular direction might put the soldering into contact again, which means that you could use an eraser, rubber band, duct tape, or whatever to hold it in place - either that or spend several hundred dollars to replace the board. If you happened to break it while it’s still under warranty, don’t mention anything to the laptop manufacturer about breaking the connector, just act dumb and accuse them of shoddy workmanship. This problem does not occur on the Mac line of laptops that use the “Magsafe” connector - since the connector just harmless falls off if excessive lateral pressure is placed on the connector.
2) Kinked cable syndrome: This happens due to repeatedly holding the charger cabling too tightly while winding the cables for storage. Eventually, the copper wiring inside breaks and you end up with the inability to charge your laptop. Make sure you hold the cable loosely in the hand so that the internal copper wiring doesn’t get twisted.
3) Hard drive click of death: This usually happens on computers over 3+ years. Unfortunately, the quality of hard drives has declined these past years, and the inevitable result are more failures. Only way to prevent this is to buy time by shutting off your computer if you’re not using it, or to activate the power saving features. Always make sure to make backups.