Nearly everyone’s heard of this one: when you plug your power adapter into your laptop, it only works if you have it in there “just right.” So you wiggle it around, watching that power LED until you find the magic angle and make the connection. And then hope it stays there. And it seems to be getting worse.
Guess what, it is getting worse.
In the vast majority of laptops, the power jack is a (relatively) cheap little part that’s only secured in place by a few solder joints on the motherboard. Just the act of plugging in your power adapter can weaken these joints and damage the pins on the jack, causing your connection problem. And to make matters worse, wiggling is damaging them even more. This happens all the time with laptops, and when you call your manufacturer (or even a lot of repair shops!) they’ll say “You need to replace your motherboard to fix that. By the way, that’s several hundred dollars.”
Don’t believe them. With the right equipment in skilled hands, replacing a power jack is a standard, even routine, repair that is a fraction of the cost of replacing the motherboard. So if you call someone about your “wiggling problem” and without looking at it they tell you that you’ll need a new motherboard, call someone else!