Hi everyone! I’m currently writing what I believe is already the longest post I’ve done to date, but I thought I would ask an important question while I’m finishing it up.

I’m thinking that my blog could use an update in the theme department. To me, the look is starting to get old. When I created it, I was just playing around with some effects in GIMP anyways, so I’m not very attached to it.

Please vote in the poll and tell me what you think! Please be honest! Leaving your comments below would also be great.

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I got a call from a guy two days ago about his Toshiba Satellite L305-S5919 laptop. He said the DC jack was messed up, and he wanted me to take a look at it. When he brought me the laptop, I looked at the jack and it was extremely loose. It looked like a fun soldering job, so naturally I got started fairly quickly.

The first thing I did (of course) was to remove all of the components from the bottom of the laptop. In this case, all I had to remove was the RAM and the hard drive (there was no battery in the laptop when I got it).



I had never worked on this particular model before, but I was assuming that taking the plastic bottom off of the laptop would be the logical next step. To do this, I removed 13 screws labeled “F6″ and three (under where the battery should have been) labeled “F3″. Some of them proved difficult to remove from their inset holes. In fact, one screw refused to come out of its hole. After this attempt appeared to be fruitless, I started looking for a different way to get into the laptop. I finally discovered that the bezel on the top of the laptop came off.



After removing the bezel, all I had to do was remove two screws, then pry the keyboard up. Next it was just a matter of folding it over:



…then, detaching the ribbon cable and removing the keyboard.



I decided to remove all of the screws I found under the keyboard. The top cover appeared loose, so I started to pry the cover off starting with the plastic at the hinges. It didn’t want to come open, and I then remembered the screw that wouldn’t come out. I tried to coax it out for a little while longer, then gave it up. I wondered if the screw was just not coming out of the plastic, but wasn’t holding anything together, so I pulled on the top cover gently and I felt it give away a little bit. I then removed the touchpad cable and the wire to the speakers, and the top finally popped off. Success!



Then I took a look at the DC power jack. Look at what I saw:



The jack had just popped out of its slot! All I had to do was slip it back in, and I was done.



…or so I thought. Apparently I had dropped a screw down in the laptop. Dropping a screw into a laptop is pretty much a computer repairman’s worst nightmare – particularly when it goes into the CPU fan. That’s exactly what I did, of course. I ended up having to take the motherboard completely out, then turn it around to dump the screw out of the fan. If you haven’t had the pleasure to remove a motherboard from a laptop before, let’s just say it’s a balancing act of putting enough pressure on the board to figure out what’s keeping it from popping out (there’s always something in the way) and not putting too much pressure on the board so that you don’t break it. Anyways, while I was at it I thought you might enjoy seeing the gutted laptop.



From there, I just reversed my steps to put the laptop back together. I didn’t get to do any soldering, but it did turn out to be a fun disassembly of a laptop. After I put the laptop back together, I discovered that even when plugging the adapter into the DC jack it wouldn’t turn on. I tested the adapter, and I discovered that both the adapter was bad too. My guess is that when the wire inside the adapter broke, the customer wiggled the cord to the point where the jack came out of its slot.

I ordered a new adapter, and the shipment was here in two days (thank you Amazon!)




P.S. The customer picked up the laptop this evening, and he seemed pleased. I was happy to give him a quick turnaround while working during the day, especially since I even had to have the adapter shipped!

For my first post in a month I think I should just give an update on what I’ve been doing for the past 30 days or so. I have been sick for part of the time, although I will cover that in more detail later when I post my update on my 30 Day Challenge. Expect that post to pop up around the 24th.

Other than being sick and working on my classes, I’ve been thinking hard about how to promote my computer support forum, Technofyed. I have never been the best website marketer, and I feel like that skill is one that I urgently need to improve. Failing the traditional paths towards inproving marketing skill, I decided to try my own method – I’m going to talk about marketing on this blog a lot for the next little while to hopefully inspire myself with unique new ideas for promoting the site. Hopefully I say something meaningful, but it’s almost just as likely that I’ll ramble on aimlessly.

Marketing is of course essential to the performance of a website. If you have the best website in the world and you don’t market it effectively, you won’t be able to get any visitors. No visitors usually means failure for a website, as most websites rely on visitors for sales, ad impressions/clicks, etc.

So let me go back to the very basics for a moment. What exactly IS marketing? I think the Wikipedia page for marketing sums it up fairly well – marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales. So, the definition is basically divided into three main sections: research, selling something, and promoting that something to help it sell more effectively.

Therefore, I will dedicate a post (or more) to each section in an attempt to delve into each point thoroughly. I will also use Technofyed as a case study, giving examples as I go and hopefully implementing some of my strategies to determine the effectiveness of my efforts. As always, feel free to leave comments about how your own marketing strategies work for you or if you try my methods.

Look forward to some new posts on the subject coming out in the next few weeks. I’m looking forward to this experiment, and I hope you will enjoy it.