Curiosity Saved The Cat

I accidentally dropped my four year-old Fujitsu-Simens laptop last Sunday as I was boarding a train on my way back to Göteborg from a meeting with some bureaucrats held at Norra Latin at the City Conference Center in Stockholm. Don’t ask me for details how I managed to surrender a 2-kg  object to the force of gravity, but I can tell you it is difficult to hold on to more than five objects at the same time with only a pair of hands.

Most of the times, I indeed wish I were equipped with as many appendages as the Hindu supreme goddess Durga.

Anyways, I discovered right away in the train that my laptop wouldn’t boot to completion. It gave me the infamous bluescreen before emitting eerie beeps signifying its intention to join the laptop purgatory, the final (un)resting place for laptops with indeterminate ills.

Luckily, I was able to glimpse from the blue screen something about the thermal sensor.

And so instead of using my social climbing skills in the X2000 train, I spent the three hours of travel contemplating what to do with my laptop.

Upon arriving home, I was still debating with myself whether to pry open the laptop or not. I reasoned that the warranty has expired a long time ago anyway, so why not? On the other hand, if I mess up big time, it will not only give me unnecessary costs but also the remote possibility of my data being lost.

Finally, as I was itching to update this blog, I reached the stupid brave decision of trying to find out what was wrong with the thermal sensor. I guessed that the thermal sensor must have something to do with the system that is cooling the main processor so I should focus on that part of the laptop where the cooling fan is.

Slowly, I worked on screws which I was sure are holding the laptop shell together.

It was nerve-wracking to pry open the plastic shell as it seemed quiet brittle and would snap in the slightest use of force. Seeing the insides of something that has given you all sorts of emotions for the first time was quiet an epiphanous event, a mix of nervousness and excitment about more unexpected things to find out. I was surprised that the keyboard interior was cleaner than I imagined it would be. After four years of  systematically dropping bread crumbs, chips, drops of coffee, beverages and other fluids onto it , I was expecting some kind of advanced life-forms already residing in the nooks of the laptop keyboard.

I proceeded dissecting the laptop and as you can see on the picture to the left, I was carefully placing down the screws on a white paper such that the positions correspond from where I removed them from the laptop. As I was doing this, I was like, “Damn, Mogli, you are so smart to figure that out! You really deserve that fuckin’ Nobel Prize!”

Seeing the complexity of the insides, I momentarily hesitated to proceed before finally conceding to that curious part of me saying, “Dig deeper, Mogli! You’re almost there!” And I did.

There is the heart of it all! The brain of contention in all its naked glory. I noticed right away that the contact between the cooling unit and the processor was a bit loose, due of course to that accidental fall. There was a paste-like material in-between which seemed to enhance heat conduction so I just spread that a little bit more on the processor before assembling back the cooling unit.

And painstakingly, I worked my way back in putting the laptop together again as  it was before. Nevertheless, despite my Nobel-prize winning idea of neatly-placed screws on a white paper, the proverbial left-over screw appeared out of nowhere! Oh no!

But it was getting really late and I was extremely tired and hungry so I was like “Screw it!”

And to my utmost delight, my battered laptop rose from the valleys of the dead:

And here I am celebrating its new lease of life with this looooonnnggg winded entry!

As for that proverbial screw, you’ll know it gave me a problem when I don’t update this blog again for more than a week.