i've made massive progress in reclaiming my broken primary laptop this morning.

so, back at the very start of may, i took the laptop apart to clean the fan. i couldn't get the thing to turn back on, but it didn't make any sense to me, unless it was some kind of ground issue. so, i let it sit plugged in, hoping the electricity could find it's way to where it needed to.

it actually did, giving me an opportunity to find the short, which i determined was either in the video out or in the screen. all i know for sure is that plugging the video card in shorts the whole board out. then, i lost power again, so i left it to sit plugged in, again...

the first week didn't get me the signal back, so i put a few extras screws in and the signal did in fact reappear when i got back from detroit on saturday morning. i've been able to reconstruct the machine and send it out into an external monitor. i'm not done testing because the bios doesn't seem to like the hard drive i'm testing with, and the hard drive that comes with the machine is currently in use. if it boots, i have my machine back.

sort of.

see, i'm afraid to even plug the screen back in. the entire screen is off the thing altogether. that means i've lost the screen and what is in it: wireless (never use...), a webcam (never use...) and a microphone (which i use quite a bit - it's my phone).

or, at least i *think* that the microphone is in the screen. we'll find out soon.

i have it connected to the monitor that i bought in november, which i needed to replace anyways because the resolution is bad with cubase. it's not so bad for video editing, though.

...and my grandmother wants to buy me a new laptop so i can call her, which will have a microphone in it.

what all of this means, for me, is that i might be in the process of spinning this laptop off into a video editing device. in fact, it just clicked that i can use one of my external webcams as a microphone, anyways. that hadn't clicked. ok...so i have a microphone anyways....

the other benefit of the board i just fixed is that it has 4 gb of ram and is expandable to, i think, 16. i'll have to check. the backup machine i'm on is 4 max and currently has 2.

i don't even need a new laptop to spin the other machine off. what i need is this:

1) a new/used monitor for my desktop. $30.
2) some more ram for the editing machine. $20.
3) some better evaluation software for editing, which will actually make sense if i dedicate the machine. i've been doing this long enough now to get some real software. $0.
4) a new hard drive for the backup machine, which will become my internet access point. $100.
5) some more ram for the access point. $10.

i mean, i'll take the laptop. i could use it, sure. but, i've hacked something out for now....

in the long run, i'll obviously want to put the screen back on the laptop. i don't actually think i damaged anything, i think it was grounded poorly due to some dangling wires or removed electrical tape or something. i'm going to want to carefully read up on this.

for now, i'm ok with the monitor out and webcam mic.

it should be reassembled properly by this afternoon.