oops

[baratron]

I broke the laptop!

I dropped it by accident and it made a loud clunk. I thought "omg!!" and opened it, to find that the screen looked normal and all my applications were continuing to run as normal. No pieces of plastic or ominous parts were littering the floor either, so I thought it had escaped unharmed. But no such luck. Sometime later on Monday evening, I noticed the battery looked kinda low considering it was plugged in, so checked the connection to the charger... and found that the little connector where it plugs in had got pushed inside the case, so the charger wouldn't actually connect to the battery. Oops.

Fortunately, I live with a wuzzie who is a Professional Computer Geek (people pay him for it and everything), and it "only" took him 4 hours to fix it:
2.5 hours to take it apart (all 37 fiddly little screws plus a couple more strange lumpy connectors, and snap fittings that wouldn't unsnap until he found exactly the right angle to get at them)
42 minutes to find the Araldite (superglue)
8 minutes to figure out how to glue the plastic parts without also gluing the circuity parts
1 minute to mix the Araldite (#1)
2 minutes to glue it before the glue went too lumpy to use anymore
1 minute to mix more Araldite (#2)
2 minutes to glue a bit more
1 minute to mix even more Araldite (#3)
2 minutes to glue the rest
wait 24 hours for the thing to dry
3 minutes to solder the glued thingy back into the laptop
20 minutes to put the laptop back together
10 minutes fiddling to make sure it worked.

Eeek.

As the wuzzie did not charge me his standard consultancy fee, I believe I now owe him something less tangible in return. But I'm not sure what. So I have been doing laundry and washing up and making him cups of tea, & stuff.

I think he is not going to let me use the new laptop, when we ever get round to buying one :(

Comments

[barakta]

*ulp*

Sounds like the iBook we spent 2-3 hours dismantling today for a friend... All we wanted was the flipping hard disk out of it. Compare that to my laptop which is 2 outside screws and 4 little ones inside the brackett... The iBook had to be completely disassembled down to component stupid plastic and metal bits.

Good thing said friend has offered us some quids for our time...

Natalya

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

I have seen the service manual for my iBook; it's a scary, scary thing. IIRC, there's a 5-page screw index, which in turn has a 1-page quick reference. Just for the different varieties of screw.

[barakta]

Yeah... And the plastic is a complete swine to separate without snapping. I don't even like the plastic look of the iBooks, it's really tacky horrible and looks dirty immediately.

Oh and yeah the owner of the iBook is a smoker, so my hands stank by the end of it - not nice... I wouldn't do this for anyone, but this person is a good friend.

We went by some website which had a different version (I don't think Apple believe in consistent versioning) and took notes of what screws went where and taped them to a piece of paper for rebuilding. Still have to find a small torx screwdriver tip for the screws on the side of the drive itself, cos we want to see if we can test it and thwap it into working long enough for data recovery. I remembered the freezer trick last night.

Natalya

[mjl]

Well, could have been worse. And if I was paying someone to fix my computer, I wouldn't want to pay them for 42 minutes of glue-finding time!

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I found the glue in the end :) It was in one of the boxes that we haven't unpacked yet from the move.

I also found a whole load of plaster dust, which explains why that room still smells dusty several months after we had the plasterers come :(

ouch!

[bondagewoodelf.livejournal.com]

I did a similar thing with the company laptop I have, only I broke the USB connector, so now I can't connect my CD burner to it anymore.

Btw, the Dutch have a saying "De liefde van de man gaat door de maag" (which translates literally "A man's love goes through his stomach"), so cook him something nice ;-)