When I first came to Kansas, one of the few possessions I had was my 2012 Windows 7 Asus K55A laptop. This laptop was beat up, to say the least. The screen had these dark blotches on it from having heavy objects placed on it. All the keys had been worn and many of them had replacement stickers on them that were also wearing off.
After I settled into my new life in the Sunflower State, I felt like my old Asus was about to give up the ghost. The trackpad was erratic and I felt like it may have had a motherboard issue that was about to render the laptop useless. So I took what meager money I had at the time and bought a sub $200 Acer Cloudbook 14. It wasn’t the fastest laptop and only had 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage but it’s tough as nails and did the trick, albeit kind of slowly.
Not too long after that, I came into some money and bought a modern laptop with a 1080p screen and a solid-state drive. I paid more for it than I normally would for a laptop. It met with a tragic end after my cat tried to jump from the floor and over the screen. He didn’t make the jump and the laptop catapulted, no pun intended, across the room. I was at least able to salvage the SSD and RAM.
For a while, I went back to the blotchy Asus due to the speed of the Acer Cloudbook but the screen kept annoying me with its irreparable blotchiness. So on a lark, I did a web search to see how much it would cost to replace the screen. I stumbled across a YouTube video that showed me how to do it myself. I ordered the replacement screen off of eBay and when it arrived I was able to replace the screen with no problem. Feeling like I could do no wrong, I cloned the mechanical hard drive to the SSD from the damaged laptop and upgraded the RAM.
I was so happy to have an almost refurbished laptop so my attention quickly turned to the keyboard. Once again, I ordered the replacement part from eBay. I thought if I could replace a screen I surely could replace a lowly keyboard. Spoiler alert, I couldn’t and don’t call me Shirley.
(To be continued)
The Trench Reynolds Report 