I remember a few nights before Hurricane Katrina was announced on the news that I had taken it upon myself to copy all of our family photos from our desktop computer to the new laptop I had purchased a few months before. The laptop was a Medion Akoya LS; a pretty, white colored ultra-light laptop with a Pentium M 1.6GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 60GB hard drive, a DVD/CDRW combo drive, and a 12.1" LCD screen with a bright display. Even though Best Buy put me through hell trying to acquire the damn thing, I rather liked it. It was small, fast and easy to carry, which turned out to be to my benefit.
Hurricane Katrina came and went, and then came the flooding. The building we had sheltered in lost power, then telephones, then running water. The gas lines started leaking so we had to shut them off, and based on other buildings around us that caught fire, it was a good thing we did. Ultimately we were rescued from the building by two generous men in a canoe who offered to take us and our kids to dry land, and start us on our path out of the drowned city. We took with us the clothes on our backs, a gallon jug of water that was a gift from our rescuers, and this laptop.
The Akoya LS survived our exodus out of New Orleans, and though we lost many things we still have our family photos dating all the way back to 2000. It also served me well as my personal computer for the next few years until it suffered a hard drive failure and I opted to repair it, give it to Brig and build myself a custom desktop computer.
In a household of small children laptops can take the brunt of a lot of abuse. Plus it's generally not a good idea to push Brig when she's mad. Consequently this little laptop was set aside after its USB ports and keyboard became unusable. Last year I determined the laptop was too expensive to salvage and set it aside.
I have a tendency to change my mind on occasion, and recently decided that based on nostalgia reasons it wouldn't be a bad idea to repair this little Akoya LS after all. It's been six and a half years since Katrina threw our lives into upheaval, and by golly it's way past time for me to fix some things; in myself, and symbolically in this laptop. So she's a bit worse for wear, that doesn't mean she's worthless. If anything, the fact that she doesn't have all the bells and whistles of modern laptop systems makes her valuable for certain reasons that I won't get into here.
Nostalgia is a big factor here. Also, I originally bought this laptop to use as a tool toward my goal of becoming a novelist. Therefore, even though it's not super fast or flashy, it's definitely valuable in that regard.
My original repair assessment involved replacing the keyboard, optical drive, battery, back panel cover for the screen and the motherboard. I also wanted to upgrade the RAM. I instead opted to only replace the optical drive and keyboard, and repair the crack in the back panel cover with a plastic superglue. I also opted to purchase a soldering iron and hot glue gun to address the damaged USB ports.
The left USB port was trashed - a USB connector had been forced into it the wrong way and it was now off-center and caused the laptop to short out. I would have to pull the battery for 10 seconds in order to get it to turn back on again. The other two USB ports were loose, wiggled and turned themselves off shortly after I ever managed to get them to work.
Therefore I disassembled the laptop down to the motherboard and removed it. I replaced old thermal compound on the CPU cooler with new compound and cleaned the dust buildup with compressed air. I popped the plastic in the left USB port back into place and reattached the port by soldering each of the connections. I had never soldered on electronics before, but I watched a few YouTube videos and practiced on an old dialup modem I had no use for just to make sure I didn't permanently damage anything. I then resoldered each of the connection points for the right USB ports, but that did not resolve their wiggle issue. The problem was their connection points on the top side of the motherboard were broken, and because they were so close together and close to other components, I could not adequately fit the soldering iron into a space where I could repair those connections. I also didn't think that solder was going to hold them or prevent them from breaking again.
This is where the hot glue came in handy - I applied it to all sides and thus solved the wiggle problem. All USB ports are now functional and stable.
Reassembly took a long time but now that the system again has a working keyboard and optical drive, everything else pretty much came together. I did not upgrade the RAM, but #! LINUX really doesn't need more to run smoothly, so I'm pretty content with how the system is working right now. I might think about more RAM later, but it's definitely not a priority for me. I've still got some tweaking to do and I need to transfer some files over, but overall I'm a pretty happy camper right now.
Oh, and for (hopefully) obvious reasons, I've named this laptop "Lenore".
