AVR Freaks

I was given an old Dell laptop because it didn't work.  Just by looking at the power/sleep and hard drive lights, I could tell it was running fine.

I took the screen apart and found the wire attached to the right end of the CCFL was broken.  Fixing that was easy.  The hard part was taking it apart and putting it back together.  After accomplishing that, I think doing open heart surgery would be a walk in the park.

I found the cause too.  There are six small screws holding the bezel to the lid.  They are covered up with rubber plugs.  The 4 across the top aren't a problem.  It was the one at the lower right that worked its way loose.  I suppose the one on the lower left could do this too.  The hinge is stiff on purpose.  Opening and closing the lid causes a high stress at the lower right and left of the bezel.  Removing the rubber plug showed the screw had fallen out completely but was unseen behind the plug.  When raising and lowering the lid, a crack would open up between the bezel and lid near the bottom.  I'm thinking that motion caused the solid wire to break where it was soldered to the CCFL.  Tightening all the screws fixed that problem.

This came with XP installed and had a small inefficient hard drive.  I put a bigger and more efficient hard drive in it.  I used a WD 500GB laptop (2.5 inch) drive, or maybe it was 750GB.

I installed Win7 on it.  It installed easily and everything worked.  The only things that didn't work were a couple of slots along the left edge for plugging in various flash memory cards.

I also tried to remove some of the stiffness of the hinges.  As I recall, there was something that rubbed on the hinge pin so the lid would stay in position.  I guess I cleaned it and put a small amount of grease or oil on it.

I didn't redeploy anything.  The laptop sits on a shelf, collecting dust.