Yesterday at my parents-in-law’s house I was looking at the old laptop that’s been sitting there in a corner more or less forever. My father in law noticed and asked me if I know of a place where old electronics can be dropped for recycling, because they couldn’t find anything near them and that’s why this laptop is still there. I asked what’s wrong with it; he said that the screen is dead, and vaguely remembered there was another hardware problem that had to be fixed but they never got around to fixing it because the screen then died.

I offered to take it, but said that before having it recycled I’ll take out the hard drive and return it to them in a USB enclosure, and that I’ll see if there’s anything else which is still usable. They were happy to finally get rid of it, and maybe even get their ’lost’ files back.

Back home, I tried to turn it on and saw that the computer seems to be alive but the screen indeed remained off. I connected an external display; the computer itself was very much alive. The touchpad wasn’t working; and the battery indicator went suspiciously quickly from empty to full. But overall this didn’t look like a dead computer.

I then removed the bottom cover and took out the SSD. Then I noticed a disconnected cable… sure enough, after connecting it and closing up the laptop, the screen turned on. Somehow the touchpad also started working. The only thing not magically fixed was the battery; but a new generic battery for this model costs around $20 - it probably won’t last long but it would still make this thing usable. Given that the hardware specs are quite impressive (Core i7, 16GB RAM, 15.6" FHD display, discrete GPU), it seems like $20 to get it back to working condition is a bargain. Sure, it’s a 10 year old laptop, but in my book that counts as brand new. A brand new old living dead computer.

People nowadays are so used to being helpless about fixing things that they don’t even try. I guess I should have known better; old laptops are definitely not as bad as new ones in this respect. Anyway, better late than never.