Well, crud.
My laptop -- an IBM Thinkpad R40 (mine is 2GHz, with 768M of memory, 20G drive) -- has been having "issues" for a while now. Hey, at 5 years old, it still runs like a champ, and a replacement would be a little more than I'd want to spend right now.
First, the USB port in the back came loose; no big deal, there's another one on the side.
Then the display started getting flaky. Specifically, the backlight kept going out on it. I finally got around to taking the thing apart to see about fixing what ailed it.
The USB connector was a piece of cake: just solder the durn thing back into place.
The display was something else, entirely. There was a dinky little surface-mount connector that wasn't making good connection, and the farookin' thing is too damn tiny for me to futz with without (expensive!) specialized tools/equipment. I mean, the damn connector is roughly 5/16 of an inch long, barely an eigth-inch wide, and has 30 electrical connections on what looks like HALF-millimeter spacing. Even with my magnifying visor and the finest soldering tip I've got, that's still just too fine for me to mess with. On the plus side, a replacement for the whole cable (FRU08K4067) will run me less than $10, so I'll be back up and running before too long.
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