Baby Guts

I was out of the house for most of the day today doing work. Yes, I do work. Yes, I do. Then I took Mayu's computer to my computer guy to see if we could figure out the problems she's been having with it.

You see, the DVD/CD player doesn't work properly, and has gotten worse as time goes on. Yesterday I was finally able to get it to open by pressing the button; until that time the only way to open it was to go in through the icons and click "open". It doesn't recognize any DVDs and it ... sometimes... plays CDs.

The other problem is that although her glidepad works fine, the left/right buttons seem totally dead. Very strange indeed. I tried reinstalling the drivers, and various other things, all to no avail. So she has been using a mouse on her notebook these past few months, while it has been pure glidepad since she bought this computer from our computer guy several years ago.

So today I took it in and we took it apart. Mother of God it has a lot of screws! I think there were like 35 screws all told holding the top and bottom together and we had to search to find them all because some of them were hidden in ingenious spots and of course prevented us from opening it up to look inside.

Here is what a high-end notebook looks like totally ripped apart, if you have never seen it...

DON'T TRY THIS @ HOME!

I wouldn't advise doing this on your own because the componentry is so miniaturized that it really is amazing. It's no wonder they have asian women putting this stuff together! A man's fingers really are too big and bulky to do this work.

The disc player seems to not work, and the model is no longer in existence. They haven't made it anymore for a few years and we couldn't find any shops on the net that sell it. So no more playing CDs or DVDs or even installing software on that computer! Mayu wants to listen to music with it so she has decided to get an SD card and transfer music that way. Her car navigation also takes SD cards so she can download music to the SD card and transfer it to the car's hard disc drive and have the stuff there, too (cool machine these Japanese car navi systems are these days with their XXXGB hard disc drives).

Then we looked at the glide pad unit and took that out. It seems that one of the leads going to the buttons has been totally burned out. My computer guy soldered another wire to it to see if it would work, but when we put it back together, it was still totally dead. The IC Unit must also have shorted out or something. That means that Mayu is stuck with using just the mouse now.

After three hours we got it all back together and I paid only JPY 3,150 (USD $32) for the time so that's pretty good.

We could send it out to Toshiba but as the warranty ended a few years ago, it would get fixed... but cost a pretty penny. And since she can still use this excellent computer (it really is a very good one with awesome stereo sound, and a glass monitor that is ultra high quality) with these couple of modification, I guess that's the way it shall sit.

Oh, the computer I bought in 1998 and haven't been able to use anymore because it is a first generation celeron chip, with only 64MB Ram and 4GB HD... I finally decided to get rid of it. I contacted Hitachi online and filled in a request to have it recycled. It will cost me JPY 3,150 ($32.00) to have it recycled, but that's good. It means it is supposed to go to a safe place, the metals removed and recycled, the dangerous stuff disposed of appropriately, and other things reused if possible. The reality of the situation of course, is more like what I saw in my National Geographic a few months back where like the USA, old computers get shipped off to central China where people dying of toxic diseases make pennies "recycling" it, melting the metals down, and enjoying toxic lead, mercury and other melting metal gases in their lungs on a daily basis.

I just hope they don't do that where they make the milk that they ship to Japan (shipped to Japan) for making butter...

Off to a ride with Masaki tomorrow. Long drive, killer ride probably knowing him, and then home to leg cramps in the night.

I love you!

Cam