a whole lotta screwin!

i took my ibook apart the other night. i think i was working on it for maybe six or so hours. it was basically unusable because you had to keep the screen very still and only at a specific angle or else the backlight would flicker on and off as you use it. through some internet searching i found that this is a common problem with ibooks and i found the part you had to replace. unfortunately maybe 4 months ago when i decided to take the computer apart to get to the root of this problem, i completely stripped two screws that held the bottom casing on, making it very difficult to remove the case without cracking it.

enter the ez-out. my father brought me home this two-piece system for removing stripped screws- one is a drill but that you use to bore into the middle of the screw, and the other is like a reverse-threaded screw, that as you unscrew it, it grips the beheaded screw tighter and tighter until it comes out. pretty neat. so i managed to get the bottom of the ol' ibook's case off and set about searching for the part to be replaced.

i took out the keyboard. i took out my wireless card. i removed the bottom panel, the top panel, the screen's casing, a whole lot of very thin shielding, the screen's backlight and inverter, and i'd say 50 or so screws, all of which were well under an inch long-- there were quite a few that were maybe half a centimeter. finally the whole bugger came apart:



cut to two in the morning. after a couple of false starts of completely assembling it and realizing the trackpad didn't work (there was a second cable for it that i inadvertently knocked out), I booted up. The screen works! The backlight is fixed! Let's see... still get wireless internet... trackpad and keyboard back to normal... speakers making sound... CD drive ejects and.... crap. disks won't show up on my desktop. i have a feeling it's some metal bar that i couldn't put back (i think i used its screw for some other part) so to get that back in would take another complete dis-and-reassembly, and i'm really not ready for that. i can put up with using an external drive or my desktop computer when i need to read optical disks until i get my coveted powerbook.

there are a good twenty or so screws still sitting on my desktop, and there are a few bulges that weren't there before (isn't that the story of my life), but i have still been able to do my homework on the train and in the library with the bugger, so i'm fine with that.

if i haven't scared you away yet, you can see pictures of my ibook's vivisection on my flickr page. and if you're disappointed that this post was about me taking apart my computer and not about me having sex, well... so am i. so am i.