The 1-2-3 Killam
Mid-Card Championship Winner
So this weekend I was packing up my laptop to go visit my parents, and in a rush the strap on my bag caught my jacket and sent the whole thing crashing to the ground. I turned it on, the screen didn't appear damaged, so I thought nothing of it and got in the car. A few hours later, I tried booting up my computer and it continually gave me the blue screen, before restarting itself seconds later. Now, I know how to use computers - I have no idea how to fix and/or troubleshoot them.
So here I am, freaking out, because basically my current livelihood is on this computer. That, and I've dropped about $1400 on it, so I really don't want it to be dead. So I figure out how to get into the boot menu, and run a diagnostics check on the whole system. A voice int he back of my head reminded me that if it didn't book, it was probably the HD. I know they're very fragile, and break with pretty much any severe trauma. YEP, the compy starts blinking and freaking out at me that the HD wasn't detectable.
I don't get paid for another week, so I borrow the money from the family I was visiting, run over to Best Buy and pick up a new SSD. I've always wanted to upgrade to solid state, definitely will never go back. So some laptops are really easy to get into. Others, like the XPS 14z, are like Macbooks and are made to basically be impenetrable. So I spend about an hour using plastic tools to pry the shell apart. Then I sit staring at it for probably another 20 minutes, trying to figure out what the hell is what. I deduce that the little box in teh corner that was HDD is...probably...the hard drive. I take out the battery, as to not shock myself because I'm ******ed at this, disconnect a bunch of random shit, and then finally get the hard drive out, with a little force. There was something rattling around in there, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's busted.
I get it replaced, and by this point I'm about 4 hours into the total process, including the Best Buy trip. I replace everything, turn it on...battery is dead. Plug it in, charge it (YES, IT STILL CHARGES!) and wait 30 minutes while I get some dinner. When I finally turn it on, belly full, it goes black and tells me "CHECK YOUR GOD DAMN CONNECTIONS, ***, YOU FUCKED SOMETHING UP!" Or something similar to that. Sigh. So I take it apart again, because I was an idiot and screwed everything back in place. Check all the connections, make sure nothing was broken in the process. Survey says: NOPE. I do this about five times getting the same result; another hour passes.
Finally I get frustrated enough to go on Facebook using my phone and ask my friend what to do. He tells me it probably has nothing to do with connections, unless I busted my SATA port, and in that case it's pretty much fucked anyway. Apparently my windows disk was just bad (funny, cuz it was legit). So I get my little brother's Ubuntu disk, run that, and it works. Halle-fucking-lujah. Then I spend about 2 hours trying to make a real windows disk, because every ISO I found was shit, and my disk drive wasn't working because of drivers, and I was getting pissed off (again). Finally my friend that works at Nvidia hears about my issues, and just sends me a proper ISO.
An hour later I've got Ubuntu gone, my new SSD reformatted with Windows, and...no internet. Didnt' have the drivers for it. So I drive over to a friends house, wake them up, and use their computer to download drivers, because I have to work at 8am. They were only moderately annoyed. So finally I have drivers, internet, and...my USB 3.0 drive wasn't working. And as I've got a much smaller hard drive capacity now, I really need my external to be functioning. ANYWAYS...the total process took about 15 hours, and I was up until 6am, but I got my computer up and running again. And it's actually much better than when I started. I lost EVERYTHING including all my photoshop stuff, but at least I have a computer again.
TL;DR - I broke my laptop and it took me 15 hours to fix because I was by myself and didn't know what I was doing. I now have a HUGE respect for people that do this kind of stuff for a living, and it's awesome that now I actually feel I can do this on my own if I need to. It was a great, very long and stressful (and expensive) learning experience.
So here I am, freaking out, because basically my current livelihood is on this computer. That, and I've dropped about $1400 on it, so I really don't want it to be dead. So I figure out how to get into the boot menu, and run a diagnostics check on the whole system. A voice int he back of my head reminded me that if it didn't book, it was probably the HD. I know they're very fragile, and break with pretty much any severe trauma. YEP, the compy starts blinking and freaking out at me that the HD wasn't detectable.
I don't get paid for another week, so I borrow the money from the family I was visiting, run over to Best Buy and pick up a new SSD. I've always wanted to upgrade to solid state, definitely will never go back. So some laptops are really easy to get into. Others, like the XPS 14z, are like Macbooks and are made to basically be impenetrable. So I spend about an hour using plastic tools to pry the shell apart. Then I sit staring at it for probably another 20 minutes, trying to figure out what the hell is what. I deduce that the little box in teh corner that was HDD is...probably...the hard drive. I take out the battery, as to not shock myself because I'm ******ed at this, disconnect a bunch of random shit, and then finally get the hard drive out, with a little force. There was something rattling around in there, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's busted.
I get it replaced, and by this point I'm about 4 hours into the total process, including the Best Buy trip. I replace everything, turn it on...battery is dead. Plug it in, charge it (YES, IT STILL CHARGES!) and wait 30 minutes while I get some dinner. When I finally turn it on, belly full, it goes black and tells me "CHECK YOUR GOD DAMN CONNECTIONS, ***, YOU FUCKED SOMETHING UP!" Or something similar to that. Sigh. So I take it apart again, because I was an idiot and screwed everything back in place. Check all the connections, make sure nothing was broken in the process. Survey says: NOPE. I do this about five times getting the same result; another hour passes.
Finally I get frustrated enough to go on Facebook using my phone and ask my friend what to do. He tells me it probably has nothing to do with connections, unless I busted my SATA port, and in that case it's pretty much fucked anyway. Apparently my windows disk was just bad (funny, cuz it was legit). So I get my little brother's Ubuntu disk, run that, and it works. Halle-fucking-lujah. Then I spend about 2 hours trying to make a real windows disk, because every ISO I found was shit, and my disk drive wasn't working because of drivers, and I was getting pissed off (again). Finally my friend that works at Nvidia hears about my issues, and just sends me a proper ISO.
An hour later I've got Ubuntu gone, my new SSD reformatted with Windows, and...no internet. Didnt' have the drivers for it. So I drive over to a friends house, wake them up, and use their computer to download drivers, because I have to work at 8am. They were only moderately annoyed. So finally I have drivers, internet, and...my USB 3.0 drive wasn't working. And as I've got a much smaller hard drive capacity now, I really need my external to be functioning. ANYWAYS...the total process took about 15 hours, and I was up until 6am, but I got my computer up and running again. And it's actually much better than when I started. I lost EVERYTHING including all my photoshop stuff, but at least I have a computer again.
TL;DR - I broke my laptop and it took me 15 hours to fix because I was by myself and didn't know what I was doing. I now have a HUGE respect for people that do this kind of stuff for a living, and it's awesome that now I actually feel I can do this on my own if I need to. It was a great, very long and stressful (and expensive) learning experience.
