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Announcement Hello, readers. You might notice that my old posts are in the process of deletion. Fear not! I have merely moved my blog ove...

Tuesday 27 December 2016

How To Fix A Loose Laptop AC Adapter

I admire Toshiba laptops for their durability. And as of today, for their AC adapters as well.

This afternoon, my laptop was not charging properly and could only be fixed by pushing on the laptop end of the charger. So after some mental preparation, I decided to take a closer look.

After taking off the back plate of the laptop, I found that the AC plug component inside the laptop had been dislodged and was too far backwards. After reseating it back into its place, I could feel the faithful snap? lock? click? of the adapter.

Fortunately, Toshiba AC components are not soldered to the motherboard.

~LP

Monday 12 December 2016

How to Remove Stripped Laptop/#0 Screws (And I How I Increased My Respect For Flathead Screwdrivers)

If you're a DIY-er, a fixer or a techy fiddler, it's probably happened to you. And it's bloody annoying. Stripped heads on Phillips screws.

It happened to me yesterday while trying to add more RAM to my recently acquired Portégé. Annoyingly, as is the trend with ultrabooks, the RAM is only accessible by removing the entire back of the laptop, as opposed to unscrewing a memory panel. Anyway, I get to the last screw - it must have been a bit tight - and lo and behold, the Phillips cross becomes more of a star.

After being frustrated for long enough that night, I screwed all the other screws back in and left it for the night (in the process, the second-last screw got stripped as well). This morning I went to Bunnings to get a screw extractor. It seemed quite a handy tool. Of course, it didn't work.

However, after reading about numerous methods of how to resolve screw problems, I sort of did my own thing.

TL;DR

I finally managed to get the screws out by selecting the second- or third-smallest drill bit and drilling into the screw a bit, also aiming to make the "hole" wide enough to accommodate my smallest flathead screwdriver. After a minute or so of careful drilling, I stuck in the flathead screwdriver (on a bit of an angle so that it could catch properly on the screw head) and turned it with great strength until the screw was loose enough to be twisted out with a pair of tweezers (as my pliers were too thick).

I certainly underestimated the power of the flathead screwdriver!

PS: If you're coming here from Google, 1) Thank you and 2) I hope this helped!

~LP

Wednesday 7 December 2016

Converters Package

For lack of a better title

Well, that's my converters package all polished and published. It was an interesting experience seeing my code from two years ago. The thing that most stood out was the fact that I had left the control names as their defaults, i.e. Button1, TextBox1, etc.

If you want to download the package, follow this link: https://goo.gl/fPsT48.

~LP