Sometimes I have the worst luck…
Laptop guts
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the DC jack on my laptop was defective, and as a result had broken off from the mainboard just above the solder joint. It was fixable, and it is now as good as new, but upon plugging it back in, I discovered that I’d hit the double whammy of laptop power problems: the connector on the power cord was damaged and couldn’t sustain a proper connection. A bit of aluminum foil seemed to provide a sufficient fix, though I planned to order a new adapter (#3 for those keeping score at home). I figured I had time, as the foil fix seemed to do the trick 100%, but last night, just as I was getting all productive by finally putting together a locally-hosted blog for myself, the connector decides to up and fail on me.
No amount of jimmying, wiggling, pressing, squeezing or other mechanical alterations could seem to get it working again. I tried adapter #1 (the one that came with the computer and died on me about a year ago) on the off chance that it hadn’t died, and all of the problems stemmed from the DC jack. Nope. It occurred to me that of the two broken adapters, I have enough parts to create one working one: #1 has a good connector, but a bad transformer; #2 has a good transformer but a bad connector. Unfortunately, only the power cord end is modular; the DC connector end is permanently attached to the transformer.
So, long story short, I’m a computer hobo again. I can’t even use my own desktop due to what we’ve diagnosed as a likely motherboard failure. So I’m on one of the “spare” computers in my apartment, which, while they are fully functional locally, are usually used in the manner of a thin client.
On the bright side, while my laptop has a maximum of 30 min. of battery power left, I was able to retreive my Firefox profile and drop it on the computer I’m using, so I at least have some of my “home settings.” I also figured out how to make the abysmal Vista user interface function in a more reasonable manner. However, I’m still not a big fan of how the file manager works. At least I’m not compulsively swearing at it anymore.
