"We can rebuild it. We have the technology...."

Regular readers of this space (all three of you ::waves::) may remember my springtime adventures trying to replace a keyboard on a Lenovo laptop. From the Ballad of Remove Screws to the inevitable reality of the existing keyboard being welded to the frame, it got beyond my capabilities.

But not those of a certain boy genius of my acquaintance.

"Boy" may be pushing it, for he just completed his bachelors from of SUNY's most prestigious colleges. He's still in his college apartment for the summer as he awaits a predoctoral program at RIT which will take him to physics places where only the truly talented may tread.

And, he's gonna take a crack at the Laptop from Hell: per his mom who I work with, he

agrees that it is likely beyond repair in the traditional sense b/c there are areas that need to be resoldered and plastic pieces that are not workable.

But there is some hope - he has the summer off and just got a 3D printer! It may be able to be re-engineered!

He will use his 3D printer to make new plastic pieces, solder the broken components, and repair as best he can in the hope that it can be re-engineered to work again.

He has done this with desktop computers with success, but laptops are a harder so there are no guarantees.

.... and that is the status of the laptop.

Thanks Ray for giving him a project to work on other than high score on his favorite video game 🙂

I love it. It's become a science fair experiment. I wonder if he'll attach two bare wires to the top that, if you connect them, will make fake lava come out of the USB port;)

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Meanwhile, I chatted tonight with an even younger boy genius who's gotten hands on my tech.

Mr. E is son of my friend Scott, who visited tonight to set up an off-air recording of a special local Buffalo TV news program. While he connected cables, I took his son and our dog out back to give Eleanor some peace from the barking. He then reminded me that around this time last year, I'd mentioned having an ancient Windows 95 laptop that I still had occasion to boot up every year or so for one odd data set or another.  Telling him this was like telling a model train buff that you've got an original 1950s Lionel set you just found in your mom's attic. I brought it over to them completely as is, the "is" including a wonky power supply, no USB ports, switchable 3.5"floppy/CD drives (useless with DVDs which hadn't even been invented yet) and PC/MIA slots for a network card and a lightning fast 14.4 modem with popout bracket for your phone line.  Somehow, kiddo's got it mostly working again! He's been going on eBay finding replacements for the dead things, including buying a boot disk that wouldn't boot. Somehow, though, soon as he took it out of the floppy drive, the old Gateway booted up from its hard drive like it was 1995 all over again!

I explained that computers are like girlfriends or boyfriends; sometimes they stop liking you, but as soon as they see you're seeing someone else, they suddenly like you again.