I got the joy of disecting a laptop this weekend. A friend has been having issues with the audio not working out of the built-in speakers, unless a headphone was connected. The normal usage of headphones is to disable the built-in speakers which caused this to be a curious project.
After pulling the whole thing apart, I found the head-phone jack was completely severed with exception of 1 (gnd) pin. The other 5 pins were only touching because of pressure from the shell to hold the two audio jacks (head-phone and mic) in place.Â
With a quick trip to Radio Shack, I picked up a 5-pin head-phone jack and some help from my best friend to solder the new jack into place the laptop was finished:
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to verify the new audio jack until after the Super Bowl. Remember the original had 6pins, and this new piece had 5 pins along with this replacement part not having the pins in the same positions. Pins 3,4 are shorted until a head-phone is inserted into the jack.
After getting home from the Super Bowl game (which was fun!) I reassembled the laptop to see if the new wiring job made things better or worse.
And the result is….
NOPE, the 5-pin audio jack didn’t work.Â
Thankfully I was still able to fix the crack shell and some front buttons.Â
Regardless my friend has a functional laptop back in their hands & knows that the audio is not fixable because Compaq uses a proprietary audio-jack that isn’t readily available.
– JJ –