DC power jack worn out

Thanks very much for your thorough answer, Philip Le Riche. I will likely give it a try, and post back here with the results. It's very tempting to pay a shop to do this sort of fix since so much disassembly is involved, but it is an older laptop, and I'm optimistic that all will go well as long as I take care of the ribbon cable sockets, and remember to check for every little screw when there seems to be too much resistance. I may also order the jimmy and spudger from iFixit before getting started, too. Thanks!

First of all, take out the RAM and WiFi card and put them somewhere safe. (If you're in a very dry climate store them in tinfoil or antistatic bags.)

There are 2 unlabelled holes in the bottom left and right hand corners. I'm sure you must have taken those out because you've got more screws than labelled holes. My guiding principle in these situations is: there's always one more screw! And it hasn't let me down yet. Sometimes it's hidden under a stick-on rubber foot, or else it's one you thought couldn't possibly need to be undone. Have you removed they keyboard and any screws under it? If you can pry the case apart at any point around the edge you can begin to see where that pesky screw must be hiding, and once you can widen the gap to a centimetre or so you can shine a light in and maybe see. But don't remove the screws holding the heat pipe to the processor chip.

This video seems to make it look quite straightforward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTzbOjQI... (But I'm pretty sure he didn't need to remove the heat pipe to clean the fan or cooling vanes.)

Hi @chapinbk ,

Here is a link to the service manual which should be of some help to you as it details the necessary pre-requisite steps and then the procedures to remove all of the parts in the laptop

[Part 1 of 3]

Thanks again, Philip Le Riche, for your pointers, and thanks jayeff for a link to the manual - very helpful. I did finally succeed at making the repair. Turned out I had to pop the keyboard off, to reach a few pesky screws that were beneath it, but once I'd done that, most everything else came apart pretty easily. Unfortunately, the Probook is still exhibiting pretty much the same symptoms as it was before, which leads me to believe that my power issue has something to do with the battery instead, or maybe the locking feature, which I don't know very much about.

Original scenario (Phase I):

Plug in power cord. Multi-colored charging indicator light flashes white, instead of illuminating orange to indicate that battery is charging. After wiggling the plug around a little bit, indicator light eventually changes to orange, and computer resumes normal operation.

Totally inoperative (Phase II):

Plug in power cord. Multi-colored charging indicator light flashes white, and...

[Part 2 of 3]

...no amount of wiggling of the plug will trigger it to turn orange. While light is white instead of orange, computer will not start at all.

Post-repair (Phase III):

Plug in power cord. Multi-colored charging indicator light flashes white, and no amount of wiggling of the plug will trigger it to turn orange. Unlike in Phase II, eventually the indicator light stops flashing entirely, and goes dark. At this time, it's possible to start the computer as usual. However, now windows 10 no longer detects a battery at all, and it's clear that the Probook is operating from the DC current alone.

I apologize for the long, multi-part post, but iFixit did not allow more than 1024 characters. Any further thoughts about what may be going on here? I have already taken this opportunity to backup all the files that I had lost access to, so by now resurrecting this computer is more an exerise in stubbornness, and less about making it a primary machine, but still a fun thing to try to do.