Laptop Hinge Repairs

When need this service:

Laptop hinges are generally made of low-cost metal alloys, or “pot metal.” Pot metal is not particularly durable, and over the course of a laptop’s life cycle, repeated opening and closing of the computer’s lid can cause wear that prevents the lid from staying in an open position. Hinges can also wear to the point that they break at the point of attachment, either on the lid or the computer’s body.

Useful tech hints:

What to Do if Your Laptop’s Hinge Just Broke

One of the most common ways laptops break, especially over the long run, affects the very thing that makes it a laptop—its hinges. The truth of the matter is that hinges are moving parts, and moving parts, whether we like it or not, fail over time. Being careful gets you a long way, but it’ll happen at some point anyway. And when it does, you need to know what to do.

The first thing you need to do is to stop using it immediately. Depending on the laptop model, a hinge break can either be a minor inconvenience or a catastrophic issue. With the hinge, you could be compromising other important components, like a power/video cable for the screen. As such, to be on the safer side, don’t touch it. Turn it off.

If the laptop is already open, don’t try to close it unless you have no way of carrying it otherwise, and if it’s closed, don’t try to open it. Using the hinge can cause more damage to your laptop and maybe even break something that wasn’t broken before.
The next step to take is to take it to a technician. You need to evaluate the damage and whether the screen’s connections sustained any significant damage as a result of the hinge break.

It might be tempting to keep using it like this, especially if everything else works. But the damage can worsen over time and eventually affect the screen’s functionality, something you probably don’t want. Because of this, you probably want a second opinion on it.

As we said in the previous step, don’t try to open/close it without a technician’s help unless it’s absolutely needed. The only case where that would be fine is if it’s open and closing it is the only way you can carry it. If you do need to do it, make sure to be extremely careful.

The technician will disassemble your laptop, assess the damage, and let you know how viable a fix is. Most of the time, unless there was damage to the actual casing of the computer, it shouldn’t be an overly complicated fix.

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