Laptop Repair Session
While being a software engineer is very different from repairing laptops and giving tech support, I still like helping people with my knowledge about computers.
There are people who are annoyed from giving tech support to relatives or acquaintances which brought the memes around saying
“Yes, I am a software developer. No, I will not fix your router!”
In my opinion it is a very good thing to make their everyday life a small tiny bit better if you know the magic to help them, as they are often just not capable to do those things because of missing knowledge and would have to hire an expensive professional instead.
So for good friends I am doing the repair and tech stuff for free, but I can surely count on them helping me in their field of professionality when I need, so it is never a one-sided profit. Besides that, helping each other is also a good way to spend time and have talks while windows is installing or whatever.
Currently, there are 4 projects which I want to talk about:
replacing a HDD with an SSD
The best way to speed up an old computer or laptop is to replace the old HDD (which often already has weird sounds on spinup) with a new SSD.
Two years ago I bought 7 SSDs from the UK (which were shipped in 7 packages to avoid taxes or something) and I have none left, which means that I am doing this fairly often.
Often it is not a lot of work but has a very great impact on the computer speed. You can even use the old HDD as a second storage using a laptop hard drive caddy as most people don’t need the CD drive anymore or never used it in the first place.
The most critical part of replacing the HDD is backing up the old data, which often works very good even though people are not that into tech and never thought of backups. Most people just have 5-10GB of personal data on their laptop and a few programs. The programs are set up on the new windows install in a few minutes thanks to the package manager chocolatey.
The procedure is nearly always the same but sometimes YouTube videos on how to disassemble this specific laptop are very helpful.
Very different but also very interesting is the replacement of the HDD in an old iMac from 2008. The plan is to install the latest OS with the Catalina Patcher onto a fresh SSD drive and replace the old one as it makes weird sounds.
replacing the T440 touchpad with a T450 trackpad
I went to repair the trackpad of a Lenovo ThinkPad T440 which was strangely moving around without touching it as if there is a small random currency going through it.
After searching for a while on the internet I found that a lot of people are replacing the bad touchpad of the T440 series with a T450 trackpad (which has physical buttons at the upper side of the trackpad).
Luckily the needed trackpad is very easy to find and most seem to be compatible. I bought it here from Amazon as I did not want to wait forever. But after installing with this youtube video I found out that the gestures and two-finger-scrolling does not work, which probably is due to the trackpad being from Alps and not Synaptics.
After installing various drivers and trying different things I could not get it to work, but I will not give up yet.
Anyways the friend I have been doing this for said that it is just fine as she can use an external mouse, and it is far better than randomly moving around.
I would be annoyed as hell if two-finger-scrolling did not work, but some people prioritize things very differently which is very good but sometimes people tend to forget it.
spoiled water above keyboard
Another friend of mine has an Acer Aspire 3 laptop which does not boot up correctly after water has been spoiled on it while learning.
The problem here is that the power button is just part of the keyboard, which makes the devices unable to boot and shutdown without the keyboard (genius acers..). Here is someone with the same problem.
So I managed to boot it by having the keyboard connected, then plugging in the power AC, which luckily initiates a boot process. But after first signs of booting you need to disconnect the laptop keyboard cable as it otherwise gets a short circuit and turns off immediately.
That’s was quite good as I then know that the laptop keyboard is the cause of the boot failure, which leaves me to buy a new one. This was a lot harder than to find a T450 trackpad as Acer keyboards are less popular and are more different from trackpads.
There is the “LV5T A51B” which has a big enter button and the “LV5T A51BWL” which has a split one like us keyboards do. Which language the keyboard has does not matter as we can replace the key from the old one, but the layout is very important.
I finally bought this one for 13,78€ including shipping from China.
I will update this post accordingly after it arrived.
update
The keyboard arrived. This wasn’t a normal package, as it came as registered mail which is a lot more expensive. I wonder how they are even getting anything from selling this keyboard. For less than 14€ you get a keyboard sent to you from China with registered mail. This feels very wrong to me.
Anyways, it works. I plugged out the old keyboard connector and connected the new one without assembling it first to test if the new one works good and its not that everything you buy cheaply from China has the quality you want (from my experience you at least get what you pay for, often even more).
Then I had to disassemble the whole laptop to get access to remove the old Keyboard and the new one fitted perfectly. The only caveat with it is, that it has slowenian layout, but I hope to fix this soon for her with a good set of keyboard stickers.
installing lineageOS on an old phone
Most old smartphones are stuck with an old Android version and don’t get bugfixes and security upgrades anymore which is a big vulnerability for devices which are running 24/7 and have internet access.
While most national security agencies are very happy with this situation I think this is a very big problem for our advanced society. We have resources for nearly everything but can’t even secure the devices we are using every day properly.
A possible solution to this comes with LineageOS which is an operating system forked from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and maintains updates for a lot of old smartphones. Samsung Smartphones are quite well maintained which made it easy to upgrade to LineageOS on a Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016) which now runs on the latest Android 10.
This is running very smoothly for a long time without any disadvantages, as you can use the Google stuff like you are used to (but you don’t need to).