Dueling Laptops

About a month ago my brother's grand daughter Amanda, brought over her Gateway laptop computer for him to fix again. JC had repaired it before, but this time it was really dead, and at first it looked pretty hopeless. He went online and looked up all of the information he could find on that particular Gateway model and discovered that evidently a lot of other people were having similar problems.

There were some broken ones for sale on E bay, so taking a chance, JC bid on them. He ended up with some that worked, but had been dropped and had a broken display screen or case, and several that were just as dead as Amanda's was. Soon his workbench was covered with torn apart computers and he began to see a common problem - overheating. He swapped bad parts for good parts and after buying a rebuilt mother board on the Internet, and several setbacks, he finally got one working.

Later, sitting on his deck sipping some wine, we looked at the cooling system on one that he'd disassembled and we talked about the poor air circulation and how it could be fixed. He finally decided to try cutting a 1-3/4” intake hole in the bottom of the case right under the cooling fan. I thought I could do it with a hole saw on my drill press, and suggested covering the opening with fine mesh hardware screen. We also discussed trying to fabricate some higher legs, to allow more air to be sucked in through the bottom.

In the meantime JC had picked up a few more of the same model in various states of disrepair, and he thought that with a couple more rebuilt motherboards, and if we could fix the overheating problem, he could end up with four or maybe even five nice, working laptops. He also found some glue-on fold up legs online and ordered four sets.

We drilled the intake holes in all four cases and JC began assembling all of the tiny laptop parts with the tinier, itsy-bitsy screws. He got to be an expert at tearing one completely apart and reassembling it in about twenty minutes, and he could almost do it blindfolded, (or at least without his magnifiers.)

After running into more problems getting Windows Vista running, a weird problem with cordless mouse drivers, and updating the seemingly endless Windows updates, he started turning out cool running, working laptops. I was very happy when he gave me the first one.

Now we set at the table on his deck, each with a laptop in front of us, playing with our toys. We can even email each other. Actually, as hard of hearing as JC's getting and as weak as my voice is becoming, email's not that ridiculous.