Taking Apart My Powerbook
So the other day I dropped my Powerbook. I was on the train and I had it on my lap, shut, because I had been working and decided that I was getting tired. So I dozed off and I'm thinking "well, if it starts to fall I'll just wake up and catch it." Well, as I'm sure you can guess, I didn't wake up in time. It hit the floor and made a pretty loud sound. Oops.
I immediately noticed that my sleep light wasn't working. I was sad, but I figured I could live without it. The next day I noticed that not only was the sleep light broken, but so was the sound! Uh-oh. All of a sudden this is a much more serious problem. I wonder if I can open the thing up and possibly tweak something to get them working again, or at least see what's broken. So I go start googling guides to take powerbooks apart, because they're constructed in a way that makes it a bad idea to do it without a guide. Well, I found one: iFixit. It has specific instructions for everything, so I clicked on "sound card" and read through the whole thing. As it turns out, it claimed, the sound card and the sleep light are on one particular connector on the bottom left corner of the machine. Aha, I say, maybe that connector's loose. So I go to the hardware store and pick up the appropriate sized screwdrivers (#0 phillips and #8 torx) and go to town. Man, taking apart such a delicate contraption is a blast.
And sure enough, when I get the thing open, the connector's loose. I pop it back on. While I have it open, I'm poking around. My latch has been broken for years -- I've always had to give the lid a little "tug" when closing in order to get it to stay closed. Well, now that I have it open, I see a tiny screw stuck to the magnet of the cover. I extract the screw and save it. I test the latch a few times and it works much better, and this makes me very happy. Anyway, when I was opening the computer, I had to only take out one of the three expected screws from underneath the battery. But I found one stray appropriately-shaped screw rattling around inside the case and another stuck to the magnet. They fit into the battery place. So this Powerbook opening was really an awesome project, because I actually made my machine work BETTER afterwards.