When you need gravity!
On Monday I come back to my desk after a break and the laptop is turned off. The battery is empty because the charging cable was not in it. As I plug it in. I hear strange crackling noises and then soon nothing at all. The laptop won’t turn on again.
About an hour earlier, I was looking at my monitor while pouring tea and poured the tea onto the desk instead of into the cup. The only reason that this could happen at all is because for a few days now I have been working at a table instead of lying down on a bean bag, because the lying position gave me knee pain. My working posture is even more unergonomic at a desk, but with the variety I plan to wear my body parts more evenly.
The tea spread across the desk and flowed under the laptop. But just under the laptop, I think, the laptop stands on small rubber feet, how is the tea supposed to flow into it against gravity. Surely it’s something else.
I research, test different chargers and read that an LED should light up when I plug in the charger. If it doesn’t light up, the motherboard is probably broken. Nothing lights up for me.
I open the laptop and look inside. The ventilation slots are on the bottom, and to look there I would have to remove the motherboard. That’s too complicated for me, and besides, there can’t be any tea in the laptop anyway. Because of gravity.
Following instructions, I perform a mainboard reset. After that it still doesn’t work.
After doing some more research and wiggling cables and saying “but there CANNOT be any tea in it,” I look for the framework instructions for removing the motherboard. It’s actually not difficult, you just have to carefully loosen six connections and unscrew five screws. Then I can look at the bottom of the motherboard and, well, it’s wet. There is also a smudged looking spot.
I dry the mainboard and connect it directly to the charger, as this works with the Framework. Now one or two LEDs should actually light up. But nothing lights up.
I’m looking for a new motherboard. This is pleasingly simple. At first I can’t believe how easy it is, and I have to confirm it elsewhere: You can install any mainboard that is available in the framework shop, old, new, they all fit. It’s like you could just buy matching pants again! I take the cheapest motherboard, which is still very expensive, but somehow promises to be better than my previous one.
My plan is to install it and see if everything works again. If that’s not the case, I’ll unfortunately have to forego the laptop’s excellent repairability and buy a brand new one, as stupid as that is. Because after such a mess something else could be broken, I have no idea how to diagnose it and whether it could even be replaced. In addition, the individual parts are very quickly over the total new price.
From Tuesday to Saturday lunchtime I work on the good old Chromebook, which luckily is in the same household as me. Every hour or two I check the package tracking to see where my motherboard is.
It will be picked up in Amsterdam on Tuesday at 8 a.m.
It’s 2pm in Milton Keynes.
On Wednesday at 2 o’clock in the afternoon it’s back in Amsterdam.
A few hours later it is in Milton Keynes for the second time and is imported (“International shipment release”).
It will be imported again in Milton Keynes on Thursday at two o’clock in the morning.
On Friday at eight in the morning it sets off from Milton Keynes to “Unknown”.
Again on Friday at 11 o’clock in the evening.
And again on Saturday at 8 a.m.
On Saturday lunchtime I find it unannounced in the bike shed.
I install it and carefully put everything back together: speaker connection, audio board connection, connection to the monitor, connection to the webcam, connection to the WLAN module, install RAM, install SSD, connection to the battery, cable to the keyboard, done. It sounds tedious, but it’s like Lego, only with smaller parts. In the end only a single screw remains.
Then I turn on the laptop and everything works again. Even my 239 Firefox tabs are still there. Feeling like Matt Damon at the beginning of The Martian after he removed his own antenna, I’m very happy with Framework’s promises of repairability. Well, the vents don’t necessarily have to be on the bottom where tea can run in, but Mia Culpa objects: “I think it doesn’t matter where the vents are, there’s always going to be some freak accident way through which tea runs in. And if there were no vents, ketchup would run through the keyboard, something is always going on.”
This is unfortunately true. I resolve to always look when pouring tea in the future.
(Kathrin Passig)