So, my Asus 1215n netbook stopped working. This is currently my children’s computer so this was a crisis because now they would be bugging me to play on my computer, which is Out Of The Question.

I put Windows 7 on a USB stick so I could do a fresh install; unfortunately the problem was that the hard drive had finally given up the ghost. Fortunately I had a replacement. Unfortunately, this is the procedure for changing the hard drive on this model:

You have to rip it all the way down to the motherboard to get at the hard drive. Fortunately, care and strict tracking of which screws went where made it doable.

The internals of the laptop were…frankly, it was the most disgusting computer interior I’d ever seen. This is what I get for letting my kids use it. I used a ton of moist wipes and canned air to bring it back to an acceptable state and got the hard drive replaced.

And while I was in there I noticed that one of the memory chips wasn’t fully inserted.

Ever since I bought this computer I had assumed that it only had one gigabyte of RAM in it. That’s what it says on the specification page! But it doesn’t. It has two. Reseating the other memory chip made it work perfectly so now the laptop actually works better than it ever has before.

At least until my kids get their hands on it again.