Another Diversion

I do consider myself a renaissance man of sorts. (Perhaps Jack-of-all-Trades-Master-of-None is more appropriate...)  I am an engineer, I like to cook, I maintain an house and the yard, I build boats and I can manage to find time to do a few other things as well.  One of them is to keep up the computers in this household.

My DW was issued a Macintosh Powerbook Titanium laptop at a previous workplace.  When she left, her former employer gave her the computer.  Very generous of them, really.  The computer has not been without its problems, however.  The hard drive and the optical drive (CD-RW/DVD) expired a few years ago.  We ordered a new hard drive and a new CD-RW/DVD-RW drive to replace the expired components and I utilized the most excellent instructions to be found at Ifixit.com to replace the damaged equipment.  My DW continued to use the machine for several years until such time as the hinges failed.  She actually continued to limp along with the damaged hinges for a period of time, but then replaced the Powerbook with a new 21" iMac.

Fast forward a few years and DD now needs to have a computer at her disposal for her homework.  Most of what she does is basic web browsing and word processing.  The Powerbook would be fine for this, but alas, the hinges are broken.  If we spin backwards a few years, a friend of my DW had a Titanium Powerbook of the same series which had some issue - probably with the motherboard in the computer, but a case that was in excellent condition.  For a very meager fee, he generously shipped his old computer to her for us to use.

This weekend, I finally got around to swapping things around.  Again, using the excellent instructions found at Ifixit, i decided that I would swap out the guts of my DW's machine with her friend's case.  I sat down at the dining room table with my tools and got busy.

About an hour and a half later, I had closed up the Franken-puter that I had created from the two non-functional machines.  I was greeted with this:

Bugger.

I re-opened the case and checked the connections between the components.  Not everything was seated as nicely as I'd like.  I re-seated the connectors, paying particular attention to the inverter connections for the display and the monitor connection.  I was greeted with better results, but still not right.  I withdrew the monitor connector and cleaned it carefully before re-inserting it.  

BINGO!

The Pig of Happiness was back. (DW's old desktop.)

There were some casualties from this exercise, however.  the case, display, heat-pipes, keyboard and display from DW's old machine are on the right along with the motherboard from the "donor" machine.  One the left are some components we'll keep for spares including a spare battery, optical drive modem filter, hard drive and power supply.  If the other machine is the Pig of Happiness, I'm not sure what to call the remains in this picture, but either Pulled Pork or the Pork Chop of Despair seems to be appropriate.

This appears to be one of those days that DW is glad her husband is handy.