Use it up, Wear it out
December 02, 2022

Those who've followed this blog for a while know I'm not at the cutting edge of
technology: I don't use social media[1], nor do I have a smart phone[2,3]. Over 
the past few years, a crack started to develop in body of my laptop, near the 
hinge. The other day, it broke all the way through. Suddenly, the whole corner 
of the laptop flexed whenever I opened the screen, and when I turned it over  
to examine the crack, a small piece of plastic fell off. I did a bit of online 
research and discovered this sort of thing happens to some laptops, and that 
once the body cracks, the motherboard can begin flexing. Ultimately, the hinge 
will fail altogether, possibly causing the screen to either go dark or to 
have other, serious problems.

The question of course was: What was I going to do about it? I'd tried 
fixing the crack with crazy glue back when it started, but that hadn't held. 
Was it finally time for a new laptop? Well, I said to myself, the one I have 
now _is_ over six years old...

So I took a trip to a couple of local stores to look at new laptops. I was 
impressed--most were cheaper, thinner, more powerful, and much lighter than 
the one I have now. They had some interesting features like USB-C plugs. But 
they were also _lacking_ some features of my older laptop, such as an Ethernet 
port. As a Debian user, the ability to plug my laptop into my router on the 
rare occasions I've had WiFi issues has been a lifesaver. I did find a few 
with Ethernet ports, but they were all $200 to $400 dollars more than the 
"average" laptops for sale.

And the more I thought about it, the only thing that bothered me about my 
current laptop was the crack and the possibility of having the screen die.
I back up my hard drive to an external drive every half hour, so if the screen 
died, I wouldn't lose much--if any--of my work. Was it truly, really, 
necessary, then, for me to buy a whole new laptop?

So I turned and went to the automotive section. There, I bought a bottle of 
JB Super Weld for $5. I painted it over the crack, let it sit overnight. I 
repeated the application the next morning. I'm building up several layers to 
see if I can effectively weld the crack shut. It appears to be working. So 
until such time as this old warhorse actually dies, I'll be sticking with 
the laptop I have.


[1] https://www.andrewgudgel.com/blog/contra-social-media.txt
[2] https://www.andrewgudgel.com/blog/forgetting-my-phone.txt
[3] https://www.andrewgudgel.com/blog/being-low-tech-in-a-high-tech-world.txt



(c) 2022 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com