I just realized that my headphone jack is not working as my computer fell out of warrantee. I missed calling Dell by 7 days. The internal speakers work fine but whenever I plug in any known working device into the headphone jack I get no sound. I ran the F12 audio test a couple of times and I got nothing out of either the internal speakers or the external speakers I was using for the test. Other than that everything appears to be working. From what I read on the community support page below if this was a failed sense pin I should have heard sound through the speakers. Right?

When I was on the phone with Dell they did tell me it was a hardware problem but since the machine was a few days out of warrantee there was nothing they could do. I did do some looking on the forums and found this page http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3517/t/19345854 listing laptops with replaceable headphone jacks but did not see my Latitude E5440 listed. Needless to say I am in somewhat of quandary. Is it a sense pin? Is it fixable? Do people fix these things?

 Does anyone have any suggestions of what my problem could be, other than not catching this while it was under warrantee? Is this something worth taking to an external fix it shop? Or am I looking at costs that would exceed the original purchase?

I did order an external USB to audio stereo adapter to see if that would give me a fix but it will not come for a few days.

What really bothers me is that I think this failed well before the warrantee expired and that by a matter of a few days Dell support just walked away and blew me off.