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Fri, 18 May 2007
Laptop disassembly
My laptop is dying.
Normally you don’t hear that; it’s really a binary thing: either it’s working, or it’s dead as a fence post. And the higher end Toshibas are built like tanks — in fact, I once dropped my last laptop off of a tank, and it kept on working — so I have a lot of time for them (forget the el cheapo low end stuff, but the Tecra and Portege lines are pretty solid. Not the best supported laptops under Linux, but ok).
Four years is getting on for laptop, and now there’s something wrong with the keyboard. One hour its fine, the next hour it wont boot because it’s generating a zillion spurious keystrokes. Yes, I know it’s terribly materialistic of me, but I’m just not into computers that won’t boot.
One is always reluctant to be trying to fix a laptop oneself. Certainly, if it’s on warranty, then you don’t even think about opening it up, but that’s not exactly an issue here. Anyway, the obvious diagnostic was to see if it’ll boot sans keyboard. How do you get the keyboard off safely?
It’s pretty rare to find exact instructions for a given laptop (they’re all different, after all, to the eternal lament of everyone trying to write Linux drivers for the never-seen-before-or-again weirdo chipsets that turn up), but in my searches I came across a site by a fellow who calls himself cj2600 that had detailed photo guides of how to disassemble Toshiba laptops including my Portege 4010. Nice!
So, pictures in hand, deep breath, and off she comes. Took a few iterations, but reconnecting they keyboard a few times seemed to fix the problem. Phew! Home free.
ENOPE.
Today it started again. Get out the screwdrivers.
It got to the point where they keyboard would only work if it was not in the laptop chassis and screwed down. The moment I tried to seat it properly, bleeep more spurious keystrokes and/or nothing from the keyboard at all.
I just managed to fix it again. The remedial measure this time? Take the keyboard out, hold it in both hands, flex it 20° in utter frustration, and put it back in. Now it works.
There wasn’t a picture for that step. Good thing I’ve got that engineering degree.
AfC
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