Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today, I am not the hero of this week’s story. Let’s get started! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My laptop has had no business continuing to run for a few years now. It’s working on 10 years old, hardly ran Windows before I formatted over the wrong drive<\/em>, and now it has suffered through a little more than a sprinkling from a water cup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first few seconds, everything was “normal” as I was panicking to turn the thing off, but capillary action won out, and everything shut off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a minute of shock and confusion before I regained my composure enough to realise the possible danger of leaving a wet appliance plugged in. While liberating my laptop from its various plugs, I realized there might be hope if it could be dried out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can not thank my father enough for his help on this project! He literally dropped what he was doing to take care of my emergency while I was in no shape to handle it myself. I just shoved it into his hands wet side down and ran off and he did the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t know much about the actual teardown, but I hear the dust and critter fur at the bottom of the unit was dry. Parts were left to dry for around a day and a half. I wanted to do a rice bath, but my father told me that those are usually just for phones and then you gotta deal with any rice dust afterwards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Before reassembling, there was an upgrade to make. I have a 1TB SSD intended for my desktop, but running Linux from a USB 3 drive with a small cable is kind of the opposite of portable, and with that sad excuse for a proper power port evicted, I’ve been able to take the laptop on Sabbath afternoon drives with my father, where we listened to a seminar by AWR. Two talks a week for roughly 45 minutes each, I had to mind OS’s umbilical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Installing the internal SSD was straightforward. The original drive is the same length and width, but is noticeably thinner and much lighter. Most importantly, it fits the provided bracket so I don’t need some improvised block to hold things in place. Personally, I think the new drive is so lightweight that friction with the SATA connection alone would be enough to keep it from moving, barring impact from the wrong side. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reassembly was delayed a few hours because my father wanted to try an epoxy to fix some plastic studs that have broken off over time. I always remember three of them rattling about, but one post’s superglue job was still holding and a small post with a fin was unfamiliar and didn’t fit any of the three holes. I surmised the later was from under the motherboard, a component that requires removing the whole screen assembly (not fun), but I actually identified the wrong screw hole. The remaining peg was located and all were affixed to their rightful positions once again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not privy to most of the reassembly, but I did catch that going by pure memory has its drawbacks when you don’t have the teardown guide memorized. Also, the F9 key popped off, and we are waiting on a magnifying glass to aid in the particularly delicate work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I brought a battery to the testing bench and arranged for the laptop to be booted to a live USB instead of my usual OS. I wasn’t there for the smoke test, as it’s called. My father reported, “The patient lives!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Further operations are believable. There is a power status LED that’s broken off a tiny circuit board that I’d like replaced some time. We also have a faster CPU I might like to try, if neither are soldered in, the sockets are compatible, and my cooling system is up to it. For now, I’m just glad my old friend is still around. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Final Question: I have been trying to look into Firewalld for weeks now for my “supercomputer” project. Any ideas where to find a tutorial with some theory and isn’t just someone demonstrating a list of tasks?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today, I am not the hero of this week’s story. Let’s get started! My laptop has had no business continuing to run for a few years now. It’s working on 10 years old, hardly ran Windows before I formatted over the wrong drive, and now … <\/p>\n