The Lazarus Laptop

My wife will tell you I'm a packrat. I prefer to see myself as a kind soul who offers second chances to things that other less-charitable folks would consign to the scrap heap.

Sure, my wife is probably right, but every now and again I score a success.

I have just raised a laptop computer from the dead. This particular machine was a pretty zippy number back in '04 when I bought it for my daughter as a high school graduation gift. A few years of student abuse later, the poor thing was heaved onto my doorstep.

The corpse sat there for quite a while. Eventually, I undertook a forensic investigation and found:

• A dead hard drive
• A missing "y" key
• One broken USB port
• A missing power cable
• No operating system CD

Several eBay shopping trips later, I had replacements for everything except the USB jack (there's still one that works), although there was one false start that left me with two replacement hard drives. No worries; I'll go to eBay again and get one of those portable enclosures for the spare drive.

So now it was time for the mystical incantations. As anyone who's worked on a computer can tell you, a certain level of patience and optimism are required. But this went amazingly well. As I write, I still haven't attached that "y" key to the keyboard, but otherwise, the formerly-dead laptop is now very much alive.

Hallelujah.