Episode: 2081
Title: HPR2081: Fixing my daughter's laptop
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2081/hpr2081.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:03:23

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This is HPR episode 2.81 entitled Fixing My Daughter's App Top.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 11 minutes long.
The summer is, my daughter broke the headphone back into the laptop.
I tried to get the remains out.
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Hello everyone, this is Dave Morris.
I want to tell you today about a bit of a hardware hack that I did yesterday.
It's about my daughter's laptop.
What had actually happened was she's a student away at university.
She lives in a, she has a flat with a friend, both studying.
They both have laptops, they have music on when they're studying and doing stuff.
And so they both were headphones so they don't interfere with one another.
My daughter's laptop has got, I guess the usual two sockets, one for a microphone, one for a headphone.
She's got a headset with a mic on so she can do gaming and stuff like that.
The headset's got a really long cable on it.
And she moved away from a laptop briefly and caught a foot on her on the cable.
Pulled it and snapped the microphone jack off.
It snapped just above the first ring going down from the main body of the plug.
And the piece was left inside the socket.
So I've got long show notes for this because I've included a bunch of pictures.
And the first one shows what the two jacks should look like.
She bought a replacement headset at some point.
She'd actually managed, and then the second picture I should say is the broken one.
You can see where it snapped, actually in the, or just below the plastic ring I think.
She'd actually managed to get the broken plug to work by jamming it into the socket
and putting a bit of sticky stuff on it, white tack I think it was.
It's one of these forever sticky things that you put posters on the wall with.
But that wasn't a solution.
And I don't think it was very reliable.
So she bought a new headset, and because the socket was unusable,
she's circumvented the problem by buying one of these digital to analog converters,
USB things, which has got two sockets on it.
And I think we went with the one that John Culp recommended or something very clear, close to it.
And that was really good. That was a good solution for her.
I've got a picture of it.
I went a bit mad at pictures.
I don't know if it's useful or not.
Anyway, so I'd checked with the various PC repair people to find out how much it would cost to get her a jack socket replaced or fixed.
And the guy said, well, the only way to fix it would be to dismantle the whole laptop,
get down to the motherboard, it will be soldered to the motherboard.
I did actually look up the manual for it and saw that it was right.
And you'd need to desolder the old one and put it in a replacement.
And this, it would cost about £100 just to bring it in the door.
And he reckoned somewhere around £150 to replace this.
So he didn't do that.
In the meantime, while she was still away at university, I came up with an idea for how to try and fix this.
And now that she's back, she's not around just at the moment.
She's away this weekend.
Because she's now back and also that she's away, she's not using the laptop.
I suggested a way in which I could perhaps fix it for her.
We tried the sort of simple things like getting some sort of glue on the end of a matchstick
and trying to hook it out that way or using a pair of tweezers or four steps, very fine four steps.
But there's no room to grab it.
And the end was just flush.
Nothing to hold on to.
So my plan was to drill a hole into the broken piece.
And to get it very centered and to get it very in line with the access of the broken piece.
Put into it a fine self tapping screw and haul it out that way.
So yesterday, as I'm recording this, she was away and I'd got her permission to have a go at fixing this.
So what I did was I set the laptop.
I have a workbench where the top is sort of two wooden jaws.
And I set the laptop in between the jaws and held it very lightly.
Put cardboard either side of it to protect the surface.
And underneath the laptop, I put a chair.
It's just an open frame on the workbench.
And so the laptop is sitting on a chair on its edge with the edge with the sockets on visible on top.
I made sure it was properly aligned using a spirit level to get it to level.
I didn't take into account that the workbench might not be leveled.
But close enough, I think.
So that was my first idea.
One of the pictures, there's a picture of this.
The picture after that shows a close up of what the socket actually looks like.
I don't know if anybody's interested in that.
But if you ever do this yourself, you can see that what you're seeing is the broken of piece of plug.
It's not very clear picture.
I tried to shine the torch down the hole while taking a picture.
But anyway, it might give you some idea.
So I have a Dremel, bought it year or so back.
But because my son needed access to one and I thought why not.
So I bought that.
And I also, because of a special offer on, I got what they call the workstation with it.
Which is like a small drill press that you can put the Dremel into.
So I put that on my workbench, clamped it to it so it was nice and rigid.
And then having aligned it pretty much so that the Dremel would be above the jack socket.
You can see a picture of me doing this just before I fitted the Dremel.
I'd got some metalwork drills for the Dremel.
I bought them recently with this job in mind.
And I plan to use the 1.6mm one because it's a smaller diameter than the actual jack plug.
It's a picture of this.
But I couldn't fit it because I discovered that I didn't have the right collets.
Collets are the things that stick in the end of the Dremel.
And you put a nut over the top effectively.
It's called a nut.
And it squeezes the pieces.
There are four movable elements to the collet and hold down the center.
And as you tighten this thing up, it closes up the collet and grabs onto the drill bit.
So my drill bits wouldn't fit.
I didn't have a collet that was small enough.
I didn't have any other means of holding the drill.
However, as ever, duct tape came to the rescue.
And a bit of that wrapped around the shank of the drill bit,
solved the problem.
And I was able to put it into the large collet and set it up to use.
And there's a picture of the drill bit with the duct tape on it.
Followed by a picture of the Dremel and drill hovering menacingly over the jack plug socket ready to go.
So I got it all aligned, got it nicely centered.
Made sure it was pretty close to vertical and started drilling.
And I took a picture of the result.
You can see bits of plastic and bits of what looked like brass.
I don't know if the plug is made of brass or something like that.
Certainly the metal bits that came out of it looked like brass.
I drilled till I'd got a reasonable sized hole, reasonable depth.
Then I went at it with a self-tapping screw.
And it's a picture of me trying to do that.
But all the self-tappers that I had, even though they're quite small, were too big for this.
Just so happened that I had a, I have the usual thing that many people have.
Boxes of junk.
Of various sorts.
But you never know when it might be useful.
And well, this is one case when it was.
And so I hauled out a little tiny hook that you meant to screw into a piece of wood.
I guess it's a cup hook or something like that.
And I tried putting that in and screwing in.
And it actually grabbed onto the hole.
And I was able to pull it gently, gently, gently pulling it straight out.
And out came half the remaining, half of the broken plug.
So it snapped at the next plastic ring.
So that was sort of hooray.
So there's a picture of the little hook with the bit of plug on the thread.
So I thought, well I'll try the technique further.
And make sure I knew the depth of the hole and how far the drill was protruding.
So I knew if I took the drill right to its furthest limit,
where it came out of the collet, then I would still not be at the bottom of the hole.
Because I didn't want to drill through the bottom and wreck something else beyond it.
So I drilled and drilled.
And this seemed to be metal all the way.
And I took it very, very gently, just a little bit.
Gently, gentle pressure on the drill press thingy.
And you could see there was a hole forming a lot of metal bits coming out.
Then I tried putting a self-tapping screw in, no joy.
Tried the little hook again, nothing.
And I was thinking, oh no, I failed after all this.
But I suddenly had a thought.
I've got some really fine screwdrivers, very, very fine flat-bladed screwdrivers that I bought for doing very fine PCB work and stuff.
And I thought, I wonder if I poked that into the hole,
whether I can sort of haul it out by sort of dragging it up the side of the hole.
So I did that.
And actually the screwdriver, I think jammed in the hole a little bit.
There was a certain amount of friction in there.
And I pulled.
And whoopie, the final bit came out.
It was only loosely held.
The other bits had been held by springs, I think.
So this came, I could probably have turned the laptop upside down and shaken it out, actually.
But still, it came out.
So we've got the hole clear.
My door was not around at the moment to start up the PC.
It's a Windows machine, I'm not switching it on.
So if she's not around, she'll be back later today.
And so then I will know if it really works.
And I'll write the outcome in the notes.
I might have cleared it only to find that the socket is damaged enough that it doesn't work anymore, but still.
It was an interesting exercise, which I thought I would share.
It's anybody else ever does this and wants to try the idea.
I think the key is to use the finest self-tapping screw that you can get.
But they tend to be fairly chunky things because they have to buy into metal.
So that's a bit of an issue.
Something else, a wood screw or something like that might do.
And effectively, that's what I used to fish out the bit that I got out by that method.
So there you go.
Sometimes the totally mad scheme actually works.
And the other thing I wrote to the book, this was just trying not to trip up your headphone lead.
All right, that's the end.
Okay, hope you've learned that interesting.
Bye now.
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