I had a rather nice experience yesterday. It seems that when I was plugging my laptop, a Dell Latitude CPx, into the docking station, it got misaligned on the tracks and proceeded to impale itself on the plug, completely mangling the dock connector.
Opening the laptop up today, I could clearly see the damaged connector in question is hardwired to the motherboard. Now, given that I paid next to nothing (ahem) for this laptop, I’m not about to pay for a complete motherboard replacement.
I think I’m screwed here.
The good news, is that the laptop still works fine; I just can no longer use the docking station, which is really kind of a pain in the ass. I’m going to take the needle nosed pliers to it later tonight. We’ll see if I do more harm than good.