Bremsstrahlung

As I've mentioned earlier, my primary computer is an aging 15" Powerbook. Being now three and a half years old, it suffers from an number of wear-and-tear issues including minor dents in the case, one of the two USB ports inexplicably not working, a severe bend in the case, and lastly and most frustratingly, a damaged set of display cables.

For several months the display showed signs that trouble was looming, individual channels would cut in and out depending on how far the lid was open. The most interesting behavior by far was a flickering contour effect which made it maddening to try to do almost anything. Around the same time I noticed that the right lid hinge was a bit messed up, it could slide vertically a short distance (that is, is a direction perpendicular to the hinge axis). I suspected that the two were related, and I have only become more convinced of this.

To make a long and bothersome story short, 29 days ago I woke the laptop up to do some internet surfing, and the screen merely showed a 50% gray. after multiple reboots and much harsh criticism of recalcitrant hardware and software, i got a hunch and plugged the video-out port into the monitor of my desktop PC. Lo and behold, my Desktop appeared, albeit squished and cluttered due to the different display aspect ratios.

My conclusions thus far are that my video card works perfectly, and my laptops LCD screen is also probably fine. A little research on iFixit showed that the wires between the video card and the LCD do indeed run through the suspect hinge. So for nearly a month I kept the laptop on my desk attached to and external display, keyboard, and mouse, putting off doing anything about the problem, but now with a new semester starting I'd like to be able to, well, move my portable computer.

So this evening I finally broke down and got started on opening it up. My particular model contains no less than 17 screws which must be removed if one is going to open up anything more serious than the battery or RAM compartments. The first 15 were no trouble, but then I hit the pair of hex screws to the back of the keyboard on the upper surface. No tool I possess can budge them. iFixit (I hate putting proper names that begin with a lower case letter at the start of a sentence. How I wish that Apple had never unleashed that particular form of bad, or at least ugly, grammar upon us in such a forceful way. Ok, back to the main sentence now: ) recommends a number 6 Torx driver, but the smallest I have handy is a number 10. My mom says she has a number 6 I can borrow, but I ended up having to put back the first 15 screws again, so that I could make this post, among other things. Tomorrow I shall resume surgery and find out what's really going inside the hinge of mystery.

The annoying part is that Apple can't use a single type of screws. My machine seems to be something like 85% Phillips, 10% Torx, and 5% hex. Surely it would be easier for them as well as for me if there was only a single kind?

In other news, my family has a new furnace. It was expensive, but central heating is quite pleasant to have when the ambient temperature is freezing or below.