Last weekend I noticed that Mark’s laptop was on a precariously low power level of 6% charge. I noticed that in spite of it being plugged in, it was not charging, however when I moved it to a different outlet it started to charge. I thought that was the end of it until yesterday when Mark called to say that the laptop had suddenly lost all power and he couldn’t even turn it on. Both Mark and I are helpless when it comes to computer problems yet I decided to investigate the issue to see if there was anything we could do. We had an urgent need to fix it since we’re flying to Newfoundland on Monday for an eleven-day holiday in Gander, the Bonavista peninsula, St. John’s and the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, and Mark would like to take the laptop with him.
I decided to check if there was any on-line help so I phrased the appropriate question in Google and got a number of hits, including links to several YouTube videos. Now that is what anyone without any computer experience should do: check for reliable on-line expertise. I found some videos that were made by skilled computer technicians. I watched several of them and diagnosed the problem. Now all I had to do was follow their advice and fix it.
I brought my own laptop over to Mark’s place last night both so that he could have Internet access, and also to give me the opportunity to watch these videos again and keep them on playback while I tried to fix Mark’s computer.
All the experts said that I had to remove the bottom casing of the laptop to get at the battery housed inside. That didn’t seem so daunting, especially when the technicians appeared to be able to unscrew the case from the inner workings in mere seconds. I do know that these techs edited their footage yet for me, all the unscrewing took me almost half an hour. Fortunately Mark had a tiny screwdriver that did the job. Once I saw the naked interior with the battery I then had to remove it and unplug it. That was another tough job because I couldn’t figure out where the plug for the battery was. I replayed the video over and over until I found the relevant piece. I unplugged it and then turned the laptop on, holding the “on” button down for a good long minute.
The next step was to plug the battery back in and seal the bottom casing. Instead of screwing it all back together only to discover that I might just need to open it up again, I carefully fitted the inner panel into the outer casing and then plugged the power cable in and turned the laptop on.
The keyboard lit up and the motor started running! However it quickly turned off. I then kept my finger a bit longer on the “on” button and then the Dell screen appeared. Pretty soon the desktop icon screen appeared. The power was very low–again, only down to 6%–and we watched it charge back up to 100%. Only when it was on full power did we try to use the computer by going on-line.
It worked! I am someone who panics and sweats bullets whenever I have computer problems, yet here I was able to take a laptop apart and fix it. Instead of spending a couple hundred dollars at a computer shop, I was able to fix the laptop by myself. After a bit of web surfing I turned the laptop off and put the screws back in. Now the funny thing is that there were four different kinds of screws and they all had their particular places, so I could not mistakenly screw the wrong one into another area. Yet when I tried to put the outer casing back in place, one screw would not stay in. It kept popping out. We decided to leave it out, believing that the lack of one screw was not going to send the laptop crumbling to pieces.
Mission accomplished.