It appears that there’s been quite a gap between posting. My apologies. I took about a week off to dedicate all of my time to an impending trial. It went quite well.
Following that, my young daughter decided that the best place to leave the water in a full 32 oz Nalgene bottle wasn’t actually in the bottle, but rather in my computer. She then decided after about 4 hours of letting it stew that she should tell me. Worry not dear current (and potential) clients, fortunately I have kept a backup of all of my files on an encrypted thumb drive. After removing the back cover and cleaning up all the water, the computer worked, sans keyboard, power button, and mouse. I could abide that. One thing I couldn’t handle: the computer was so slow that it could not keep up with my typing. This resulted in me billing for only half of the work I’d done. This was a nightmare I assure you. Therefore I was not typing more than I had to.
So, deciding that I’m going to crack this thing open and fix it, I bought a full on external hard drive and moved everything over. I had entertained using Carbonite online backup but I guarantee the NSA is all over that. So, I cracked the computer open and immediately became convinced that I’m a fool that would be doing all of his work on his 6 year old backup computer.
So I grab a Blue Moon, an old toothbrush, some q-tips, and some rubbing alcohol. After about an hour of removing a screw then taking a picture with my phone to be able to go backwards, I discover what seems like a perfectly legitimate culprit:
Now, this is a good picture, but it still does not fully show you just how thick this corrosion was. It was AMAZING. Well, I got it back together. I had a small war with the ribbon connector for the keyboard. A little research on the Youtubes showed me there was a hinge. Once I flipped that it was smooth sailing.
Now I’m ready to give up the law and be a computer repairman. 100% full recovery. Okay, maybe I’ll stick with the law, but I have to tell you, ramping up to normal speed after a week of the snail’s pace I was at, well, I’d say it was a difference between night and day, but it was more like the difference of a night on Neptune and a day on Mercury.
So, the computer is up. Blogging shall resume tomorrow.
