Repeatedly Fried Motherboard Opinions/Discussion

Ok so I've tried searching these forums for something related to this and have come up empty handed. I also nosed around Google some without any luck. So here is the story:

My recently deceased 4-yr old Thinkpad R40, while a workhorse that took a lot of abuse without many complaints, suffered from what I thought was an abnormally high rate of mobo failure. I had to replace it basically once a year for the 4 years I was at university. I never really gave it much thought while I was in school, mostly I think because I never had to pay for the repairs. It was all handled on campus through the student warranty program. But now that I don't have that kind of protection anymore and am waiting on delivery (hopefully tomorrow or the next day) of a new notebook, potential causes of this repeated hardware failure have been on my mind.

I have a theory that I want to test, and which was what I was using Google to try and find the answer to. It is this: I kept the computer plugged in to an outlet in my apartment living room. The thing about this outlet was, however, that it was kind of loose, and the prongs on the power cord could easily slide out just enough to sever the power connection to the notebook. This was annoying because I would often return home to find my laptop sitting there dead after one of my roommates had bumped the cord and slightly unplugged it. So whenever I was around and heard the audible beep of the disconnected power supply, I rushed and plugged it back in. A lot of times it would be instantaneous because I would be sitting on the couch with the laptop on my lap. This happened often, multiple times a day even when everyone was home.

What I'm wondering is, would these really fast little disconnects and reconnects to the power supply have the potential to ruin the mobo? It is the only thing I can figure for the repeated replacements my poor laptop had to endure. My roommates had the same computer and never experienced the problem. I was the only one that ever consistently used the suspected outlet.

Sorry about the long post. Thanks for sticking with it. What do you all think? Could that be the cause or did I just have a crap machine prone to mobo failure and I was simply in love-struck denial?

 

I vote "love-struck denial" and do not think it caused the problem.

 

Yeah. The rate of frying is abnormal, but unless it slid in and out really, REALLY fast (we're talking milliseconds), causing an overload that the failsafes couldn't deal with, you were just unlucky.

 

Hmm ok thanks for the input.

 

You're thinking way too much about this. Plugging and unplugging a notebook is part of normal use, what it was designed for.

You just are a very unlucky person, or whoever was performing you mobo replacement was not qualified to do so, or the vendor is turning out defective parts, or the power in your house was very bad and your lack of a surge protector allowed a spike to kill the hardware.