contagious: fin

Despite Joe/Frank’s laptop being 10 days out of warranty, I tried emailing the seller just in case he might take pity on me and fix it (being that it was only just out of warranty), or failing that, give me a quote for repair.

Alas, the warranty thing didn’t work (I really hadn’t expected it would) and he said it would be far to expensive to bother with repairing.

Damn.

Would it be uncharitable to think he was hoping I would purchase a replacement laptop from him?

So, I reluctantly chalked it up to a life lesson (about buying second hand laptops from eBay) and did what I should have done in the first place: I lashed out and bought an Eee pc (and for only $297! Which is way cheaper than they were when I bought the T23). Joe/Frank can use it until the school laptops are rolled out later in the year and then the adorable wee Eee pc will be mine – bwahahaha. Everybody wins!

Still, I wasn’t really satisfied with this conclusion, after all, I’d spent $300 on a second hand T23 that lasted a smidge over 3 months (of which 7 weeks were spent sitting turned off in the laptop bag).

So I thought about it for a whle and I googled. I found I had some RAM and a CPU left from when Fenton made the T20 frankenputer, years ago and swapped them out (well the RAM, the CPU was not the right size). No joy.

I thought about it some more and used my mad googling skillz some more and then found this: a fabulous forum thread about my exact issue! Apparently caused by a bit falling off the underside of the motherboard and which some very clever people had managed to resolve with soldering. I spent Saturday afternoon stripping it (a quite arduous task and not for the faint hearted!) and what do you know? The same bit had fallen off!

PIcked up a soldering iron this morning, Don-the-genius soldered it back on, I spent a good hour putting it back together and … voila! One fixed and working perfectly T23!

So now we have a surfeit of laptops, which is 17 kinds of splendid!

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5 thoughts on “contagious: fin

  1. I bought a second hand laptop from ebay for James and it is crap! I also bought an EEEPC – I’m glad you have one, now I can ask what to do with it – mine has Linux and I can’t install anything .. I can’t get it on the internet because I can’t get into my modem configurations to make it wireless (my PC won’t let me for some reason ) otherwise it would pick up the connection – because it picks up someone else’s!

  2. My own laptop which I adore immensely and has been fabulous for almost 3 years – which , incidentally I bought from dealsdirect (!!) .. has a broken power connector so I have to find someone who is able to solder a new one on, I miss it so very much.

  3. Harriet!Sadly, it’s going to be a long wait until I get mine back. Bring on those Govt suppplied laptops!If it was me, I would reset my modem / wireless access point to the factory settings so I could (hopefully) connect to it. But that is just me (and then you’d have to configue it all again, which is a bit of a pain) and resetting is how I solve most things.My (or should that be Joe/Frank’s?) eee pc initially connected to a neighbour’s wireless access point before I forced it to connect to ours, despite sitting 5 cm away from it (stupid d-link).You should totally solder your laptop yourself! You have mad crafting skillz, I’m sure this would extend to electronics (says she who made Don do the soldering).(I so totally owe you 57 emails)

  4. There should be a little recessed button at the back of your modem that you can hold in with a pen or the head of a pin (ensuring that you wipe off any dancing angels first) for about 10 seconds.Make sure you know the default username and password first (which is probably somewhere in your manual) – usually something like Admin / Admin.Yes, so very cute – roll on August, when I can finally get to play with it!

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