Reader tking says his laptop started out with a bad power jack — but has slowly escalated in brokenness with each Dell intervention.

tking says:

My problems started when my Dell Vostro 1510 laptop wouldn’t keep the power cord plugged in without extra effort. The first tech support person was more interested in replacing the power supply, I was told not to worry about the plug. The second request got more attention after I also uploaded a picture of the power jack now missing the center plastic part to let them see first hand. They sent a guy to repair it (who didn’t seem to know what kind of computer he was fixing when he came). I wasn’t home at the time and when he was done told my wife he left it in sleep mode. After he left she went to wake it up and start using it to update the budget and do a little online shopping.

That’s when she started to realize that something was wrong. She couldn’t get it to boot up… sometimes the screen would flicker, sometimes nothing at all. I picked up the laptop during my lunch break and took it back to work to look at it. I managed to use a Windows system restore to get booted, but required another service request to figure out all the fun new warning messages I was receiving. That support person was able to get that part straightened out (somewhat, it still seemed a bit off) so I shut the laptop down and took it home with me at the end of the day.

After that, the next fun time started when I wanted to use the laptop to work on some emails… it wouldn’t go more than a few minutes at a time without rebooting, sometimes it would just go black and freeze. So the second support request of the day (and 4th overall) I ended up running diagnostic test after diagnostic test. The next new fun problem came up when during the tests I started getting yellow vertical lines down the display . Now they say I need another new motherboard and now a new video card.

To sum up… 4 tech support requests and 1 on-site visit (so far, plus 1 tomorrow).

The math looks like this:

1 bad motherboard + 1 Dell repair = 1 more bad motherboard + 1 newly created bad video card + 1 more Dell repair

I’m a little afraid the next repair will result in missing the display or keyboard or something altogether.

Oh dear. Well, it seems that you’ve got the situation in hand, despite the tragic results.

We’ve all got our fingers crossed for you. Right guys? Cross your fingers for poor Mr. tking, damn it.

Good luck.

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