Originally Posted by
Continuity
Ugh - I hate working on laptops - even common repairs/maintenance like cleaning the fans/heatsinks and replacing the keyboards seem to have had *no* thought put into them into making it practical, and as for repairing/replacing what should be simple things like broken power/USB connectors - they surely
could be made a lot tougher to prevent them from breaking in the first place.
It's like the designers have been
told to make laptops to be essentially disposable devices, which is really stupid as the screens (if not the cold cathode tubes that light them from behind, and the inverters that power them
) although the newer ones that use LEDs should improve that) usually last for a long time, and modern processors mean that even 4-5 year old machines are more than capable of doing what most people use them for.
I don't like them much myself, but a friend of mine who was seriously short of cash had two identical laptops with different faults and I thought I could salvage a single working laptop from the two dead ones. As it turned out for a total of £40 worth of parts (the new screen) I got one working completely and the other mostly working.
Ohh - do tell. What was the problem with it?
You were a little presumptuous in your use of "problem" in the singular there
Seriously, it had one broken mainspring and two set mainsprings, a broken suspension spring, worn escapement pallets, one wheel had some bent teeth, the pendulum crutch wasn't right and the whole thing was covered in so much black oil that it's amazing any part of it worked.
Fixing it involved sorting the bent teeth, refacing the escapement pallets, replacing all three mainsprings and the suspension spring, cleaning untold amounts of thick black oil off everything, and adjusting the pendulum crutch to give the right clearance.
To be clear it was beyond economical repair, I only took the clock on as a project to learn more about how the guts of Westminster clocks worked. I charged the guy for the parts I used and rounded in my favour, as when I returned the clock I was happy I'd gained at least as much as he had.