Catherine, I've had to do a few laptop repairs over the years. I find that a magnetic screw driver is the most important tool. The screws in laptops now are tiny! Especially in the ultra portables. I've never replaced a mother board or a processor in a laptop but I've done the rest. Mouse pads, screens, keyboards, RAM, disks are of course simple, wireless network modules, Bluetooth modules, card readers. There's a fuser board gone in a laptop a few feet away from me at the moment and I haven't the first clue how I'm going to handle that. I think I'm just going to suggest that the person brings it to someone else. I'm comfortable enough at this stage to just be straight with people when I cant do something when it's a private transaction. Especially if it's going to take a few hours. I just don't have the itme or patients with it any more. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Moss Sent: 23 November 2013 17:37 To: 'blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org' Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Recommendations for blind people to repair laptops Hey guys, I'm big on the hardware side of the equation as well as the software side of it, so I'm wondering if you can provide some pointers on how visually impaired folks repair laptops with as little sighted assistance as possible? Desktops and servers I can usually do just fine with, though laptops are harder since every manufacturer is different, and I never want to just start taking screws out willy nilly, for I don't want to end up destroying something in the process. What do you guys usually do when a laptop has a hardware problem? Have any of you devised a method to be able to take apart laptops? I mean, sometimes it's easy to do without the diagrams by using common sense, though for example, take this Dell Latitude E6530 I have. Getting to the back of it is easily done; there is only a singular panel that needs to come off; gosh, I changed the ram out on this one without any help at all. But getting to the keyboard? I couldn't figure out that without sighted assistance if you paid me to. The manual instructs you to pry up on the medal framing around it (the entire keyboard is surrounded by aluminum), but they don't specify in a very good description where, and my CompTIA A+ certified friend can't even figure it out. And when he tried to, he had a sighted tutor with him, and the tutor couldn't figure it out without the manual. Another example is my CA. 2005 Toshiba laptop, and that thing had supposedly a dead clock battery and a dead hard drive. I'm not sure what happened, but the thing clearly died. I just had to throw it in the garbage today since it was giving off a burned electronics smell before I managed to figure out what else was wrong with it, and after replacing the clock battery and hard drive, the motherboard basically died of me and my sighted, though more hands-on than technical herself, friend and I handling it. Every sign was there, and I stopped worrying about a disconnection; since it was smelling, it had to be DOA when my friend returned it to me four years ago when it had been in his possession. But the point is, every laptop is different, and since those little wires in there are tiny, so how do we keep track of them? Those tiny slots and connectors; even my sighted friend was struggling with the Toshiba, probably part of the reason why the board fully died (before we had attempted to fix it, it was smelling bad, though the laptop was basically working, though the time was wrong and there was, of course, no OS installed). I mean, replacing a CMOS battery is of course a bigger deal on a laptop than it is on a desktop or server, so how do you go about it? Do you just leave the deep repairs to the sighted? If so, then we should change that. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins