At the risk of being a broken record, I have a habit of receiving broken technology. The expectation is that I will either repair it and find it a good home, or recycle it. Both have the benefit of keeping that tech out of the landfill, and I really enjoy tinkering with something until I can get it functional again. It brings me a lot of joy. My daily driver laptop is one of these wonderful devices.

I was given a Lenovo X1 Carbon, 6th generation laptop that wouldn’t charge. It charged via USB-C (new-fangled tomfoolery!), and multiple chargers had been tried at different max voltages. The signature orange “I’m charging” light stubbornly refused to turn on. The battery was practically new, and tested fine, so that wasn’t it. After some research, I discovered that this was a fairly common issue for this laptop, and that it was likely that the power management chip on the motherboard had failed. Given up the ghost. Thrown in the towel.

Replacement motherboards weren’t cheap, but they were available on eBay. So, I took the risk of getting scammed, and ended up receiving a fully functional replacement! So, I swapped it out and voila, the power worked! Charging happened! So, I added a M.2 SSD, Linux Mint, some vitally important stickers, and I had a new daily driver!

And because electronics are going to be electronics, a few months later, the sound died. After quite a bit of troubleshooting (the Linux kernel had updated around the same time, so I went so far as to install Windows on it to be sure), I determined that it was yet another motherboard component that had died. As Cartman once said, “Screw you guys, I’m goin’ home.” A friend handed me a bluetooth speaker that attached to a surface, and used that surface to amplify the sound. I stuck its magnet to the back of the laptop’s monitor, and the WHOLE MONITOR became the speaker. It worked great!

For a while. The speaker was inexpensive, and its bluetooth connectivity wasn’t incredibly reliable. Keeping it charged required some cumbersome cabling from a USB-A port to the speaker, which drained the laptop battery quite a bit more quickly than without. To be fair, I used it that way for around a year. Eventually, though, the annoyances wore me down, and I went back to eBay to look for another motherboard.

Not only had they halved in price since I’d swapped out the last time, the model with the upgraded CPU (i7 rather than i5) was also available. I once again lucked out with a fully functional replacement part! The laptop is much snappier now with its upgraded processor, and the SSD access seems faster as well (though I haven’t verified, it might be bias). The onboard speakers are once again doing their thing, and my daily driver lives on!