I broke my laptop

I'd been trying to upgrade to Ubuntu Feisty online but my laptop kept turning itself off after a few beeps. I realized that the fan was not turning on.

I had a spare fan (from a time when I thought the fan wasn't turning on but in fact was just a bit hard starting, somehow that fixed itself and stayed fixed for a year and a half or so). So I decided to replace the fan. Unfortunately, the laptop is an older Winbook model and apparently, in their first few iterations, the case design was rather obtusely inelegant. I've got a more recent Winbook and *that* is *very* much nicer to work with.

So I had to take out a whole bunch of screws (some of which I'm not able to put back in the same place again) and detach some cables and do a whole lot of other work just to get the *power* cable of the fan attached. Replacing the fan was trivial. It was connecting the power cable of the fan that was a pain. I should have just gone to the local cell phone repair shop and had the guy there solder the cut ends of the new fan to the cut ends of the old fan power cable.

I didn't do that though. Instead I actually tried to get the fan connected to power directly. Unfortunately, this involved opening up the laptop to a degree far greater than I had anticipated. And in doing all of that, I seem to have touched something and now the power won't go on. I might bring this laptop to a repair shop (or ship it to the U.S. to be fixed for a fee). It won't be anytime soon though. Instead, I just swapped the hard drive with a slower but much lighter winbook laptop I had lying around, and took the RAM from the bad laptop and put it into the new winbook (after doing some online research to make sure the memory was the same for both models, it was).

Now I've got a laptop that's half the speed (3Ghz to 1.5Ghz but with a bit more RAM 1GB to 1GB+256MB since I just moved the RAM over to the new laptop).

I like the smaller laptop. It's certainly a heck of a lot more convenient to lug around than the 3Ghz desktop replacement. I'm going to miss that 3Ghz though. I hope I can get it fixed. I'd love to keep working with it, despite its weight, for another 3-4 years :-). by then quad-core CPUs will be out and dual-core laptops will be as cheap as these winbooks were when I got them :-).