Tales from the Deep End

It has been a few days since my last post, today I will discuss an interesting technical issue I had over the week-end. A friend of mine has a laptop that was working fine and all of a sudden turned off and never came back on. Hmm likely story, something I am sure all of us heard at one time or another. I told her to bring it in and I would have a look at it over the week-end, little did I realize that it would take up most of my week-end. It started out as a good turn for a friend turned out to be a long drawn out task. So I did all of my usually techy things to get it to start and the bugger would not come on or even show a flicker of power. Wow I thought this thing must be fried, so I torn the laptop down and removed all the pieces looking for any burnt capacitors and any other suspicious electrically charred areas, nothing. So I decided to put it all back together and wouldn’t you know I had a few spare parts, bonus I thought and added them to my collection, and I love spare parts. So I took the laptop back to work and had it laying around for most of the day, I had a wild idea that I would try one of the a/c power adaptors I tried on Friday, this I thought would be a serious act of insanity but what the heck, so I plug it in and I could not believe it, there were lights on the panel. I tapped the power button and the laptop screamed to life. I was thinking to myself, you have to be kidding me, all the work I did and now it decides to work?? Well fine, I made sure everything was working and called her to tell her I fixed the thing and that I did not want to see it in here again. I also told her to buy a new a/c adaptor and battery. I was about ready to buy a new motherboard for it, guess I saved her a few hundred dollars. Laptops can be very strange machines; sometimes they have a mind of their own.

Until next time,

Kineo