my laptop's brokey

I'm using the wifi on my pda to write this but can't stand the small screen and no keyboard! My laptop won't charge - where the cord plugs in is very loose. As we're expecting another snow storm, I doubt we're taking it in tomorrow.

That's what I get for using my laptop on my lap LOL.

I'm not too sure how I'd use tin foil to make it work... but I figured I had nothing to lose, so I took out the battery and grabbed a pair of needle nose pliers and gave the pin inside the charger hole on the laptop a good yank. It worked on the second try and it's charging now, but I was scared to move it when that light lit up so I'm going to let it fully charge before I light it up. Don't think this is any kind of long term fix LOL. But I get almost six hours out of the battery.

...and I've learned how to maximize the lap, and the laptop often shares the space with a kitty. The darn thing has the cord out the side though, not out the back, and I don't use a pad, so I'm sure it's loose from shifting on my leg.

I'm fully charged, and the first thing I did was back it up!

So far so good! I am SUCH a bad girl though - I'm sitting here cross-legged with the laptop on my lap, charger cord plugged into the laptop.

I'm using a Toshiba Satellite A505. It's because I set it on my lap, the cord plugs in the side, and it pushes up against my knee. It makes it become loose. The issue is I think it evenutally looses contact with the wires inside. If this were 10 years ago I'd just unscrew the back and hook it back up myself, but it's a little more complicated to get inside of these things now. The keyboards used to pop off, which was great, because if you spilled something on them, you could just pop the keboard off and run it under water, and drip the stuff out of the laptop and dry it off. Not these days. To clean my keyboard, I had to pop off every key to get at it.

So far, it takes some adjusting with the needle nose pliers. Sometimes I have to push, other times pull, and I seem to need to push it toward the front of the laptop - but I seem to be able to get it charging again.

I liked to keep my battery conditioned, so I always let it run down before charging fully, &etc. The difference is now, I won't use it while it's charging.

Well, I'm not sure how long I've had it - a little over a year, I think, and I got the extended battery, and I'm still getting just about 6 hours out of it (with the 16" screen). So it doesn't seem to have hurt it!

The manual doesn't say anything other than that the battery should be periodically fully discharged for the meter to read battery life properly. It also says that the battery should be removed if the laptop isn't going to be used for longer than 8 hours. Doesn't say anything about removing the battery with house current use - only that to discharge the battery, it should be unplugged.

Interesting, yes - but I can't actually imagine a scenario where I need to store a battery. And thankfully we did buy the extended protection, because they never last three years, yet I won't need all the bells and whistles that come with new stuff - have more computing power than I need, in fact. Just need it to work when plugged in.

Thankfully whatever yanking I did is still working (knock wood). Also, Gary has the same laptop, so if necessary I can always charge my battery in his laptop. I just didn't want to be without a laptop for the week or however long it'll take them to fix the darn thing.

OK, so here's what happened with the laptop.

I keep small dishes of water all over the place for the cats. One of them (feel free to laugh at how stupid this is) was on a table under which I set the laptop on its side when I'm not using it. Flowerbelle, as we ALL know, pushes things off of stuff when she wants attention.

Yup - the water went over, and killed the keyboard on my laptop. Got a wireless keyboard - worked great.

For whatever reason, it drove Gary nuts. He insisted on switching drives, so I could have the working laptop box. He, of course, got fed up of the wireless keyboard, so took the laptop to Best Buy because of the extended warranty.

Long story about Best Buy's service being skipped, the laptop was declared dead, and he got a new one. (They get a month, so Gary was without a laptop for a month).

So I adjust all the water placement in the house, and Gary and I haven't used cups without tops for years now.

And guess what happens this morning? I'm having coffee (in a cup with a top). It's on the table. I forgot to CLOSE the top. Granted - if it spills, it's not the same as a mug dumping everywhere, but it still spills. I get up... and come back to my coffee dumped on the laptop.

It's not bad - it looks like most of it is on the outside, and there's not much of it. *PHEW*

I get out the paper towels and clean it up. I open it up to make sure there's none on the keyboard... and there isn't. I notice the screen needs to be cleaned, and there's some cat hair in the keys, so I decide to give it a clean. I take out the battery (and it's unplugged). I clean the screen, vacuum the keyboard, and run over it all with a slightly damp paper towel.

I turn it back on. Everything seems fine. BUT THE TOUCHPAD WON'T WORK! The button that turns it on and off is flashing on and off, and the little icon on the screen is just flickering on and off.

I figure I got the little button stuck somehow when I was cleaning it. I unplug, unbattery... get a pin out and poke around the edge of that little button.

Start it up again.

Well... at least the little button isn't stuck. I can turn the touchpad off and on. But the touchpad and the right/left buttons DO NOT WORK.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I HATE THIS. This is WAY more of a PIA than the broken keyboard. The wireless one fit right over the top of the laptop keyboard, and I could easily use the number keypad and the touchpad.

This? THIS I have to use an external mouse, and I have to remove my hand EVERYTIME I want to click on something, move the cursor - SUCH a PIA I cannot tell you.

Hopefully I'll be able to find an external usb touchpad I can at least place over the non-working one, so I can get rid of this infernal mouse.

Mostly.... Mostly I am just royally angry with myself for letting this happen!!!!!!

I continued this thread - I started it in January LOL.

I managed to keep it charging for quite a while, actually... but then Flowerbelle dumped water on it and rather critical keys on the keyboard stopped working. The update is in my last post, earlier today. Gary and I swapped hard drives, so this laptop is now his old box, but everything worked. ...Until Flowerbelle dumped my coffee on it this morning.

The coffee didn't directly cause today's problem as none of the coffee fell into the closed laptop... my deciding to clean the keyboard (since I had to clean up the coffee on the outside of the thing) somehow made the touchpad and right/left click buttons stop working.

TODAY IS MY LUCKY DAY!

Turned on the laptop - and touchpad is working again!