This story is about a hand-me-down Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop with the following antique components: P3-500MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM, 9GB hard drive, and an add-on Linksys WPC11 802.11b wireless card. It was pretty sweet when first purchased by my younger brother circa 2000, but now it probably won’t meet the minimum requirements for lots of charities. I don’t necessarily enjoy always using slow old hardware — of course I would love to have shiny new hardware — but I really can’t just turn away a stray.
The other user of this laptop has a history of destroying my old electronics. In this case, it is a bad habit of always fully opening the laptop screen, over my repeated protests that this would weaken the hinges. Well, two months ago or so, my prophecies of doom and gloom came true — the hinges gave up their ability to support the weight of the screen. Unless the screen was at a perfect 90° position of unstable equilibrium, it would gradually fall open or fall closed. After my admonishments of I-told-you-so, her protests of “but the screen shouldn’t wear out like that!” went unheard by me and the laptop.
After one particularly-infuriating incident of laptop-screen-is-falling-down, I was all set to exercise my long-awaited-excuse to buy a sweet new laptop. But curiosity got the better of me, and I found this link: Repairing a Loose Dell Laptop Display (huge “thank-you” to Geoff Kuenning). Five minutes and two turns of a tiny eyeglass-screwdriver later, this laptop feels like new again.
Nothing comes for free:
- The screws are covered by little rubber bumpers that need to be pried out; prying them out weakens the adhesive used to hold them in there. Someday the bumpers will fall out and won’t stick back in.
- The act of reseating the screws will slightly strip the screwhead and/or screw seat. Someday the screw will not want to reseat itself.
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