I have a perfectly good Asus K501 sitting in a drawer. It can't be powered up because the power jack at the back has come loose inside. For a while we could get it to work by wiggling the cord from the power supply but now it's dead.

I've researched online, and apparently this is a fairly common problem with an easy fix: you either resolder the jack onto the circuit board, or replace it.

But you have to disassemble the entire laptop, everything else comes out before you can get to that jack, and I'm not confident I can do that job and have it work when I'm done. I've watched it on youtube, and it doesn't look easy at all. It's cheaper to buy a new laptop than pay somebody to fix that one.

But i just had a thought. The battery pops out, and there is a 9 pin (well, not pin, blade I guess you'd call them) connector where it makes contact. Can I just run the laptop tethered from that connector, using the original power supply? It's rarely on batter power anyway. Can I buy that connector, or maybe individual female blade sockets? How do I find the pinout for the blades? It seems likely to me that 3 are power and ground to the PC, 2 are charging leads for the battery, and the rest maybe monitor state of charge or something.