June 2009
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Archive for June 27th, 2009

Aww, sonuva crap.

Posted in Geekery, Life on June 27th, 2009

The crime scene: the living room floor.
Description of event: came downstairs to feed the cats on my way to work and discovered:

      1.) Laptop power transformer cord on the floor almost to the kitchen. When last seen, it had been plugged into both said transformer brick and the wall outlet 7 feet away.
      2.) My Toshiba laptop, upside-down on the floor in front of the bookshelf it normally rests on top of.

Normally, the laptop sits on the top of my 7′ tall bookshelf as the only available horizontal surface in the living room unlikely to be covered with cat hair and the only place where the laptop is unlikely to become a cat pedestal. The power transformer sits in the corner of the windowsill, which is another handy horizontal surface midway between the nearest outlet and the top of the bookshelf.

Possible cause: I’m guessing that a certain gray mackerel tabby named Trouble Underfoot managed to get his tail (which is semi-prehensile and, we suspect, owner of a brain all it’s own) wrapped up into the cords as he jumped off of the windowsill, in the process pulling the laptop off of the bookshelf.

Partly my fault, as I had been in the habit of leaving the laptop a) running, b) charging, and c) perched kitty-corner on the shelf for best cooling airflow.

In any case, I think the poor beastie may be dead. Every time I press the power button, I get a different response, ranging from I get a power LED and nothing else up to allowing me to enter my login password before it freezes up. Popping the main panels off and re-seating all the connectors I could find hasn’t done much with it, the next step will be to completely dis- and re-assemble it.

Luckily, this is a Toshiba laptop and it was assembled with completely sane Phillips-head screws instead of some esoteric design I have never seen before. They even went so far as to make use of only 3 sizes of screws – One about a centimeter long that holds almost everything in, a tiny one for tight places, and a stainless steel one on a couple add-in cards.

Wish me luck…