That's Jeff there giving me a look under the hood of the touch-screen tablet he put together himself. He took my laptop apart and put it back together, testing for certain things along the way.
I owned up to dropping my beloved Titanium several months back. I had an external PCI wireless card in the side port. When I first got the wireless card, I tried to be diligent about removing it when I'd shut the machine down and travel, but after a couple weeks (of course : P) I got lazy and ended up keeping it in the slot all the time. The design of this card is such that when it's connected, it juts out a half inch or so beyond the casing...
When I dropped the laptop, I was taking it out of my bag to place on a desktop, and when it slipped from my hands, it fell on its left side, the side with the PCI slot, the side with the half inch of plastic and metal card sticking out of it. That card pretty much took the full force of the drop. I totally freaked out, but once I got the hyperventilating under control, I set the laptop up and found that everything was working fine. The keyboard was a bit uneven, physically, so I popped the keys off and looked at the guts. A part of the internal frame that holds in the PCI components was bent out of shape and pushed up out of the even surface beneath the keyboard. I flattened it back again as much as possible, and put the keys back over it. Everything was working fine and the bump wasn't pronounced enough that it pushed into the screen, so, I considered myself incredibly lucky and moved on.
That drop caught up with me over the past couple weeks. First, my CDrom drive went. It wouldn't fully accept disks anymore. Then, a few days later, the wireless card seemed to fail. After removing it and testing it on another laptop and finding it worked fine, I concluded it was my PCI slot that was dead. Ack. Then last week, just after my eyes (I admit it! What do you want from me? I'm a boy! A boy with needs!) wandered, my laptop stopped booting up, and when she would, she would end up freezing on me after some random amount of time. Sensitive, no?
Well, once Jeff opened 'er up, we found several places where components and wiring were physically out of alignment. The CDrom drive and external PCI slot were not fully connected to the motherboard. Jeff relocated and reconnected, and along the way tested and powered 'er up in various states of undress. In the end, we found that most components worked fine together while he had the laptop opened up. Once it was all sealed up again in its case, though, powering up successfully became a roll of the dice. Frack.
It seems like there are problems in several components. The best we could figure out, and I can currently manage, is to start up successfully one out of four times or so, and success depends a in different parts on the physical position of the power plug in its socket, the position of the keypad, and even, it seems, on the angle that the screen is sitting at.
It's like trying to get a better signal on the old TV set by sitting or standing in a certain way in a very particular part of the room, y'know?
And y'know, even after it gets to the screen with the Apple logo and the spinning tequila worm, it will still freeze-crash at some random moment later on.
Jeff provided me with some spare hardware (he's got quite a collection, thanks to some friends and family who have come to consider their Mac purchases as disposable within a couple years, heh) that I can use to do a transplant of my hard drive to an Apple desktop case or perhaps another Titanium shell, if I can locate one on eBay or thru friends. Apparently laptop owners will pretty regularly try to unload an otherwise functioning machine because of a bad or dead screen, and at sub-basement prices. I haven't checked into that yet.
* A short time later...
I wrote all of the above on the Titanium after getting it up and running for a while after the garage visit (and in between calls from a friend telling me I shouldn't stay in computering on a Saturday night), but didn't post because I wanted to include the pics and still hadn't downloaded them from my camera. While I was downloading, I lost 'er. I'm now finishing up on my blue-and-white G3. Frack.
I will start looking seriously at the new laptop now. I just hafta skip... what? A couple years of McLunches, and that oughtta pay for it. Oh, and a few months more for the AppleCare...
Frack.
Keep on keepin on~
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