siliconchip.com.au Australia’s electronics magazine April 2019 53
SERVICEMAN'S LOG
Dave ThompsonThe vast majority of my ‘bread-and-butter’ work
is mundane to the point of being drop-dead
boring. Most of it wouldn’t even pass muster as
a footnote to more interesting stories. If I wrote
a column solely about these jobs, you’d probably
unsubscribe in disgust. However, occasionally a
job will come along that is worth mentioning.
A laptop, spilled tea and a crack
One such job that comes to mind is
something I tackled a little while ago.
A customer brought in a laptop that
wouldn’t boot.
It had been working well until re-
cently; I’d given it a thorough service
about six months ago. But while clean-
ing a shelf above the computer desk,
the owner had dislodged a decorative,
over-sized tea mug and this had fallen
onto the laptop, landing square in the
middle of the keyboard.
The machine wasn’t running at the
time, but when she tried to power it
up after the event, the lights were on
but nobody was home. She called and
asked for advice, and my recommenda-
tion was that she bring it in so I could
assess it, see what’s going on and then
we could go from there.
It seems to be the way things often
work out that the customer was in the
middle of an assignment that was due
in a few weeks and her main concern
was losing her data. I told her on the
phone that while it was very likely
her data was intact, I wouldn’t know
for sure until I got my hands on the
machine.
The fact the laptop wasn’t running
at the time, and the likelihood of the
hard disk being mounted some dis-
tance away from ground zero, meant
that it would probably be OK.
When I opened the lid, the first thing
I noticed was a slight bulge in the centre
of the keyboard, which she confirmed
was the area of impact. While barely
perceptible, it was readily apparent in
the right light. That sort of thing never
bodes well, given the lack of room avail-
able in most laptops; something must
have given way under there.
-^ Repairing a beaten laptop
-^ Cleaning PC motherboards
-^ Philips air fryer repair
*Dave Thompson runs PC Anytime
in Christchurch, NZ.
Website: http://www.pcanytime.co.nz
Email: [email protected]
Items Covered This Month
I whipped the back plate off and
removed the hard disk, which I then
plugged into a workshop computer
using a USB-to-SATA bridge adapter.
I ascertained that her data was still
where it should be and informed her
that while I’d need to run a few tests
over the drive, the fact it spooled up
and could be trawled without com-
plaint meant I could be reasonably
sure it would be all right.A stern lesson on
backups
The customer was
understandably re-
lieved to hear this
good news, and I
took the opportu-
nity to give her my
standard back-
ing-up pep talk.
Like most peo-
ple, she had a