The Cyborg's New Display
Jul. 7th, 2006 05:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsYesterday, after I had gotten home, the screen on my laptop, Kusanagi, started to freak out again. It had been stable, on and off, for the past week, but finally, last night, it died completely. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fallenpegasus had long ago offered to give me two dead T23s that he had lying about the house and had never gotten around to doing anything about, so I accepted his offer. He said he left them in the foyer of the house where he lives and I could just stop by and pick them up. Someone would be there.
My problem is that I was taking the buses. It took me no effort at all to get to downtown. Finding where to grab a Bus #10 to take me to the Aloha House was a different story. I ended up walking all over downtown only to discover that I had been dropped off where I was supposed to pick up the bus and had walked to the far end of the downtown route. It took a run and a jump to actually catch the bus I wanted.
Ah, well, the delay gave me time to read the very first Anita Blake novel, by Laurel Hamilton. I wasn't all that impressed with it, sad to say. The universe in which she writes is very cluttered, as if Laura Hamilton just threw everything into a pail and mixed well, and ended up with a vague, beige mess. I wonder if it gets better as it goes on. First novels are hard to get right. I also finished reading the short story Real City, which was interesting in its premise but weak in its execution, and John Updike's The Afterlife which was a real violin piece. Having chewed up most of my lunch hour on the bus, I grabbed a quick sandwich from the bagel shop at Pike Place Market. Mmm, lox.
I sat down with a single screwdriver and in ten minutes had disassembled one of the dead laptops, taking off the monitor and putting the chassis back together. Another ten minutes and I had Kusanagi in pieces. Ten minutes after that, I had Kusanagi re-assembled with the new screen, turned it on and boom, I had video. It must have been the cable, which is one of the few components on a laptop that gets a lot of mechanical torture and carries data. I've done this so often I didn't even need the manual; I can strip a T23 down to its bare metal by memory now. That's kinda scary.
But I have a working laptop again, yay! There's an odd brightness somewhere vaguely in the middle of the monitor, but then there was the same thing on almost all of my Thinkpads. I think there's just something weird about the way the backplane distributes the backlighting across the LCD. There's focal points. It's not really noticeable, unless I worry about it. The last one was down near the bottom; this one cuts right across a display field. That shouldn't interfere with my writing, though, and that's all that really matters. And if it does get really annoying I have another monitor I can try.
Thanks to Mark for getting this damn thing working again.
fallenpegasus had long ago offered to give me two dead T23s that he had lying about the house and had never gotten around to doing anything about, so I accepted his offer. He said he left them in the foyer of the house where he lives and I could just stop by and pick them up. Someone would be there.My problem is that I was taking the buses. It took me no effort at all to get to downtown. Finding where to grab a Bus #10 to take me to the Aloha House was a different story. I ended up walking all over downtown only to discover that I had been dropped off where I was supposed to pick up the bus and had walked to the far end of the downtown route. It took a run and a jump to actually catch the bus I wanted.
Ah, well, the delay gave me time to read the very first Anita Blake novel, by Laurel Hamilton. I wasn't all that impressed with it, sad to say. The universe in which she writes is very cluttered, as if Laura Hamilton just threw everything into a pail and mixed well, and ended up with a vague, beige mess. I wonder if it gets better as it goes on. First novels are hard to get right. I also finished reading the short story Real City, which was interesting in its premise but weak in its execution, and John Updike's The Afterlife which was a real violin piece. Having chewed up most of my lunch hour on the bus, I grabbed a quick sandwich from the bagel shop at Pike Place Market. Mmm, lox.
I sat down with a single screwdriver and in ten minutes had disassembled one of the dead laptops, taking off the monitor and putting the chassis back together. Another ten minutes and I had Kusanagi in pieces. Ten minutes after that, I had Kusanagi re-assembled with the new screen, turned it on and boom, I had video. It must have been the cable, which is one of the few components on a laptop that gets a lot of mechanical torture and carries data. I've done this so often I didn't even need the manual; I can strip a T23 down to its bare metal by memory now. That's kinda scary.
But I have a working laptop again, yay! There's an odd brightness somewhere vaguely in the middle of the monitor, but then there was the same thing on almost all of my Thinkpads. I think there's just something weird about the way the backplane distributes the backlighting across the LCD. There's focal points. It's not really noticeable, unless I worry about it. The last one was down near the bottom; this one cuts right across a display field. That shouldn't interfere with my writing, though, and that's all that really matters. And if it does get really annoying I have another monitor I can try.
Thanks to Mark for getting this damn thing working again.
