Sunday, March 09, 2014

I fixed some hardware!

This is a personal first. I took my wife's laptop apart and repaired it!

My wife has a Lenovo 670 that we bought in India. Its a low-end laptop that I chose for her because we were in the market due to my son spilling water over the good Toshiba that she originally had. "You use it mostly for browsing", I had reasoned, adding: "Besides, its a Lenovo, which used to be a Thinkpad, so these things are rugged; and more importantly it has the chicklet keyboard so we're covered on the water spillage scenario from now on".

While it indeed was rugged, it didnt endear itself to my wife because it was slow as hell. Still, she was not a fan of the Mac and was happy that it was the one Windows machine in the household.

Fast forward 2.5 years later and across the globe where we are now, the poor laptop had fallen for the umpteenth time from the side table (I think it was the son again - this time a well-placed kick in sleep) and the wife found that she could no longer charge the laptop. The connector could still be seen inside, but it was not in its slot and couldn't be paired with the charger.

"Husband, can you see if you can fix this?" she asked. I quickly googled the nearest Lenovo service center and left it open in a tab for her to see.

A few weeks later, she got around to calling the service center only to be told that they didn't service any models sold outside the US of A, thank you very much.

We considered shipping it off true desi style with some hapless acquaintance to be delivered to a service center in India that DID service such models, but thought it might be not worth all that hassle.

So my wife repeated her original question and went one step further and found a web page with instructions on how to do it.

Two or three weeks later, I got around to looking at it. The initial steps were all pretty standard - unscrew 13 screws, turn over, unscrew 8 other screws and so forth. The rest were decidedly not unless you've been assembling and disassembling laptops (or other electronics) all your life.

Here's the thing about electronics these days: They're giant 3-D puzzles that have been put together in a space the size of a football field and then squished into the final size that you get it in. There is apparently one and only one way to take the thing apart and almost everything requires you to take the whole thing apart. Must be nice to be in a market where your product has no serviceable parts or the act of servicing it will render it non-serviceable.

So I got around to removing the battery (of course), back cover, the hard disk, the connection to the wireless lan and the optic drive. I had skipped the memory hoping it would not be germane to my fixing the power supply connection. Going through the next steps. however, it looked like the only way I could get to the power supply was by removing the fan, the cpu heat sink and the cpu itself.

Now this is not new territory to me - I HAVE disassembled a laptop before - solely because of my cheapness. Back in the early 2000s, they sold an abomination of a laptop called eMachines - they had great specs and were cheap; except they killed themselves whenever you ran more than 3 applications because the cpu heated up past its allowed range due to the cheap heat sink they put in. One way to solve this was to open it up and clean out the sink yourself.

Anyhoo, because of that experience, I knew that taking the CPU out implies putting in new compound - something that I didnt have then nor had now (side note: I had taken a chance with the eMachines and put the hardened compound back as-is and it did work for a while :) ). So I did what everyone would do - tried taking either the bottom half of the laptop or the bevel surrounding the keyboard without touching the CPU or its sink.

After about 5 hours, I gave up. All natural light had gone by then and I really couldnt work with the incandescent lights and the Walmart tools that I had. So I gave up for the next few weeks.

Finally, I picked it back up today. Started at about 11 am and by 6 I had the bevel around the keyboard removed. Here's the kicker: Remember I told you that these things are 3D puzzles? Well, not only are they puzzles, they're also traps: manufacturers put in blue paint on screws and stickers on specific components that will tell them if we've actually looked inside. The thing that held me up for a good 4 hours? One screw that was hidden under a Lenovo sticker. After I found it at 3 hours and 57 mins counting, I realized that special gum those kindly folks at Lenovo used would not allow me to peel the sticker off. It had to be scratched out - leaving no doubt that whatever warranty this laptop could have been under has now been voided.

Once the bevel was removed, I could look at the connector. Sure enough everything was fine and all it needed was to be put back in place. To their credit, this Lenovo had taken all kinds of weird angles of the charger and worked well until recently. I dont know if there was a bit that did hold it in place, but it looked like all they had going to keep it there was a snug fit. So I made that a lil bit snugger with some quickfix glue and closed the whole thing up.

And by "closed the whole thing up" I mean "Spent the next 2 hours painstakingly following the instructions in reverse order, of which half an hour was spent looking - unsucessfully - for the one washer that got away and was now hidden in the beige savannah called my carpet, then reaching the last step only to realize that step 8 was reinstalling the keyboard (a link off to another page) that I'd missed so going back a few steps to take gajillion screws out again and popping the keyboard out and finally getting it all together with 2 screws outside"

As if on cue, the wife showed up and asked nonchalantly: "How's it going?". This must be how CEOs and VPs feel.

We fired it up and it hasn't exploded - yet.

My wife, of course, noted dryly that it seems somewhat slower - like my hardware machinations could have magically slowed down the electronic pathways inside Windows 7.

I was just happy that it worked :). We hi-fived. She said she's proud she married someone who knows how to fix things.