putting glue in my laptop

tl;dr i glued my laptop's hinge mounts down because the plastic broke.

i get a lot of compliments on my teensy tiny white 2008 netbook, and i love it all so much, but it's not all rainbows and sunshine in this world; like caring for any gentle creature, it has its hardships:

brittle plastic

old thermal paste

expensive replacements

niche community

old specs

yes, that's right: the earth reclaims all things in due time, and i'm fighting to keep it from taking my baby away from me, although, all i can really do is prolong the inevitable.

brittle plastic

yes, i feel like every time i open this suckeroon up to perform some maintainance on it, a plastic tab breaks loose. this machine is weathered, and i'm debating on using tiny bits of duct tape in some places to keep it more sturdy.

thankfully the build quality is half decent! there are big old rubber pads on the bezel and feet of the machine, and there are lots of screws keeping it together.

The mount for the hinge is screwed down into some plastic holes, which broke a few days ago. I used some superglue to keep the mount in place, and i think it's doing an okay job, but in order to prevent too much strain, I'm just going to keep it open, rather than closing it.

I wanted to loosen the tension coil, but I don't have a wrench small enough to get at the tiny little bolts inside of the hinge, so I'll make due with just the glue for now, and pray that it's enough!!

old thermal paste

i haven't replaced the thermal paste yet, but i think i might have to, honestly. The box is 13 years old, it's way past its due date...

expensive replacements

a new screen is $300 cad. that's enough to buy a new laptop! so i'm going to be /very/ careful not to break this screen (not that i was planning to, anyway). of course, i could just plug it into a portable vga display, as well, but it would be slightly more awkward...

a battery with a larger capacity would be nice, but i only use it for a few minutes when i'm out and about, anyway, and i bring my power adapter with me, so it's okay! a new battery is around $50. not a killer, but not a bargain either.

ram is about $50 as well, but i don't need much more, considering the processor only has one core.

a new disk is about $25 for a cheap ssd. i know, i know, i shouldn't cheap out on the drive, but i have a better quality external hdd that i use for backups, so it's not a huge deal to me!

a new motherboard is way too much, i think a new keyboard is around $40.

as much as i love this thing, i can't spend too much on repairs. i /did/ need to spend $15 on a replacement power adapter though.

niche community

no-one has an eeepc 900. actually, quite a few people do, but it's definitely not as mainstream as, say, the thinkpad x200.

thankfully, there are a /few/ people out there who own these lil guys. a nice internet user told me about needing a bios upgrade, and one of my friends has 2 of this exact model, so it's nice to know people still like it!

old specs

i'm a retro fan, yeah. i can totally comfortably work with 1gb of ram, 8gb disk, and a 500mhz cpu, but look... cores are nice.

having 4gb of ram would be nice, because disk caching is really handy and makes the computer uber snappy! i could totally get behind 4gb of ram (or even 8)!

i don't need disk space really, as an academic programmer, but it's definitely nice to not have to worry about it. for my cli-only machines, 64gb is enough. on my graphical machines, i prefer over 512gb, just because i record a lot of videos and the extra space is nice for when i want to download a game or something.

as mentioned above, single-core computing is a bit "meh". having 2 or more cores just makes multitasking super smooth, and is definitely worthwhile! i'm pretty sure nearly every processor nowadays has at least 2 cores, and it's realy tempting to upgrade, but i already have a 4-core, 3.5ghz desktop for when i'm craving some power, so it's okay!

also arm is cool. i could probably do all my work on an arm sbc (like a raspberry pi), and it wouldn't cost me nearly as many watts. hopefully arm becomes more popular in laptops and desktops, so that we as a whole can compute without using so much power!

until then, my netbook only runs on 35 watts, so i don't feel too bad about it!

okay, i'm done ranting about my laptop again for now, haha!

june 18, 2021