I ♥ My Superior Geek Skillz

I’m back!!!  I actually sat on my couch with my tea service tray on my lap, my computer repair toolbox next to me and took apart my laptop.  I suspected that the water spill totally killed my trackpad and caused the problem where I couldn’t boot up any more.  The BIOS had no option to disable the trackpad via that method, so I wanted to try to manually disconnect the flex circuit from the motherboard and try that.  I figured, “Hey, I’ve got nothing to lose at this point.” 

I would have just bought another laptop at any other time (my current one is about 6 years old), but I wanted to “get my geek on” and I have a really specific laptop in mind to replace this old one.  It will have the next leap in CPU technology with a quad-core processor (instead of the current dual-core).  This will allow me to do both digital photography and advanced video and editing with my laptop.  I can only do this on my big horking desktop right now.  I spilled the water on this laptop in early March and the next gen laptop is rumored to come out in April or May 2010. 

Getting to the trackpad connection was a total bitch. I had to remove all screws (except for those that hold the screen together), disconnect the screen from the motherboard and chassis, remove all peripherals (optical drive, RAM, hard drive, and wifi card), remove all plastic covers, doors, disconnect and reroute all internal wires and cables.  Luckily I had another laptop with a schematic of the internals nearby.  I took a good forty minutes to get the danged thing apart when finally I disconnected the flex cable leading from the trackpad to the motherboard.  *WHEW*

Next it took another forty minutes to get the blasted thing put together again.  I left a few panels off, didn’t finish tightening all the screws (a computer nerd’s Hail Mary trick), plugged it in and hit the exposed ON button at the top of the circuit board

THE LAPTOP BOOTED RIGHT UP!  I logged in to my account, got on the network, checked a few pages on the internet, then shut down.  YAY!!!!  I finished assembling all the final pieces, had MrBeep get a trackball mouse from the other room and voila, I am back in the virtual world.  Now I can check DrGoogle all I want, watch my netflix stuff, get a little facebook amusement, play games, and most importantly, post and keep up with the ALI community.  Me = Happycamper.

I talked to the grrrl monsters all the way through the process.  There were kicking around and jostling the tea tray with the parts in response.  I will absolutely teach them how to troubleshoot and repair computers when they grow up. Girl Geeks Unite!