My headphones broke in my i9300 laptop

I was listening to music with my headphones, and accidentally pulled the cord too hard. Result: half of the headphone plug is now broken off inside the socket. It's buried back in the back, and I haven't tried digging it out, but I have a feeling it won't be terribly easy to get out through the hole. If I were to take the computer apart (this is on my inspiron 9300 laptop) would I be able to access it from the inside? or is the plug solidly encapsulated by metal?

If that's a dead end, any decent suggestions to how to get it out? The double whammy is that I broke my headphones... which is annoying.

Thanks

- Get a short piece of stiff wire that you can easily fit into the jack, and touch the broken off plug with.
- Dip the wire into some super glue. Bump off any excess drops from the end of the wire.
- CAREFULLY slip the wire in and make contact with the broken plug parts. CAREFULLY - don't touch anything else. Did I mention to be CAREFUL...??....
- If all goes well in 20-30 seconds you should be able to pull the broken piece out of the jack.

Done this before....usually works pretty good.

Good Luck - B.B.S.

BlindedByScience said:

- Get a short piece of stiff wire that you can easily fit into the jack, and touch the broken off plug with.
- Dip the wire into some super glue. Bump off any excess drops from the end of the wire.
- CAREFULLY slip the wire in and make contact with the broken plug parts. CAREFULLY - don't touch anything else. Did I mention to be CAREFUL...??....
- If all goes well in 20-30 seconds you should be able to pull the broken piece out of the jack.

Done this before....usually works pretty good.

Good Luck - B.B.S.

Click to expand...

I've done this before as well for dc jacks and headphone jacks. Works pretty good. If that fails you could try a small pick but that is hard to do without damamging the jack

There's a very good chance your headphone jack will look as follows:

http://www.xmission.com/~jstanley/ilo256/5-solder_joints.jpg

The laptops and MP3 players I've taken apart have all had that sort of jack. If you can pop up the cover of your laptop a bit and access the jack you should be able to push out the piece of the old male plug from there. That is assuming the other's advice doesn't solve your problem. Most of the time the Jack is on a seperate piece of PCB connected with a ribbon cable to the mainboard - so in worst case scenario if you trash your current jack just screw a new one in. The hard part is finding a place to order it from.

I've got more experience with this then I'd like to have. I replaced the headphone jack on both my Laptops once (Sony Z1 and Fujitsu). I think it's probably the Grado headphones which did them both in (Super high quality Grados vs. Thin copper and cheap plastic = Cheap plastic is destroyed).

Use a really large magnet(and I mean REALLY large) and suck that baby right out of there!

thanks a bunch, i'll give the superglue a shot this weekend... i might skip the magnet though. LCD screen and all, you know. I'll post again on how it goes.

wait, lcds get affected by magnets?
i mean theres a magnet on top of the lcd panel to sense when the screen closes

Not really, Magnets can induce currents in wires, but as long the magnets is steady with no sudden movements you're safe. (All depending on the arrangement off the wires inside of course.) He should be more concerned about his harddrive.

BTW: Which laptops use magnetic switches to sense the whether the screen is closed or not?

/casper