“I glued bits of the broken 3D model to the original’s remnants and Blue Peter’d a working part”
In which cats and mice make fools of men and women alike. There is a moral to this month’s series of destructive tales, but you may not like it…
Amouse has shown me a glimpse of the future. As much as I’d love to report it was a talking house mouse ( Mus musculus), it was really a very ornate gaming peripheral ( Mus double-clickulus).
Actually, it was a pair of Finalmouse ( finalmouse.com) pointers, which arrived in the shop looking battered by late-night COD sessions. One, an Air58 Ninja, once had side buttons but these had been obliterated. The other, an Ultralight2, wasn’t broken, but the customer preferred its scroll wheel to the Air58’s. The customer smiled, pushed the bits over the counter and told me to phone when it was done.
If you’ve never handled a Finalmouse (and I hadn’t), you’d be surprised how lightweight they are. The designers have drilled the casing out to lighten the device, which is an effective feature as the Ultralight2 only weighs 47g. Achieving the magical triumvirate of light, strong and resilient is a technical nightmare and a little research revealed that Finalmouse users feel they’ve missed the goal on the Air58. Broken side buttons are a common complaint.
The Finalmouse is easy to dissemble because it’s designed with screws and not glue. So far so good. The remains of the side buttons could be easily removed as they were held in, without screws or glue, behind a moulded flange. I sent off a couple of emails looking for spare parts and turned my attention to the scroll wheel transplant. Finalmouse wins points here, too, as this is also modular, so switching the two , despite a slight size differential, was a five-minute job.
The emails went unanswered and it looked like this repair was on the skids until I stumbled across a Reddit post taking me to Thingiverse ( thingiverse.
com). Thingiverse is owned by 3D printer manufacturer, MakerBot. It’s an online community with a library of over two million 3D models for anyone to download and use, and it’s the glimpse of the future I mentioned. On 28 August 2019, Thingiverse user AskerOne uploaded a 3D model of the side buttons for the Air58. The original design has also been evolved to add extra rigidity and strengthen the weak areas. This is “parts-on-demand” and surely a progressive way forward in certain aspects of repair. We can take a broken mouse, TV or whatever and print the replacement parts we need. What if manufacturers contributed to a repository like Thingiverse? It’s not suitable for every component, but it would make a dent in the number of products that are landfilled for the sake of an unobtainable plastic widget.
Now, I said it was only a glimpse of the future because, as I discovered, the reality is somewhat different when you don’t have a 3D printer. I investigated a few online printers such as Hubs ( hubs.com), but I wasn’t confident in my ability to select the correct options, so I found someone in the PC trade with a machine and begged for a favour. A few days later, a parcel arrived containing some bits of plastic and a note saying “don’t you dare send me anything like this again”. It seems the model was a pig to print and the results in my hands looked shabby. With a little sanding, they fitted inside the mouse, but the plastic didn’t have the flexibility required for the button mechanism, and one firm click snapped the lot and cost me a few quid in the swear box. But AskerOne’s modified design had an inspirational effect, so with some tweezers and my magnifying glasses, I glued bits of the broken 3D model to the remnants of the original and Blue Peter’d a working spare part. Works like a charm.
Driven to distraction
At least a broken mouse button gives you a definitive area of failure. Faults rarely give any clues, and Martin’s 17in Lenovo laptop was doing everything it could to distract me from the problem.
Martin said the machine wouldn’t start and, once I’d got my hands on it, I confirmed that getting as far as the splash-screen was random. What I did notice was subtle interference on the screen, so I grabbed a screwdriver and plundered my stockpile of spare LCD panels. As it happened, I didn’t have a 17in LCD with a 30-pin connector in my box of bits, so I used a 15.6in panel. The machine fired up and I proudly declared to the customer that I’d found the problem. Rule #326 of the revised standards of the Fixers and Repairers Technical Society (I’m deputy treasurer of the FARTS) states that you never tell the customer it’s fixed before it actually is. Don’t predict, forecast or presume. Fix it, then confirm it’s fixed and make the call.
A new 17in screen arrived the next day and caused exactly the same problem as the original. As the machine was stalling during POST, it wasn’t going to be a Windows/driver
“It was only a glimpse of the future: reality is different if you don’t have a 3D printer”
issue as we’re not that far into the boot cycle. The HDMI connection to our test monitor matched the shenanigans on the panel, so I ordered a new fly cable to connect the LCD panel to the motherboard. Another day and another fail. The fly cable made no difference. I could still see the blips of distortion on the screen, and they seemed to coincide with when the hard disk kicked in.
This is where experience, hunches and luck can come to the rescue. I removed the drive and the machine behaved, even with the original screen. The original hard disk passed the tests, but for reasons beyond my diagnostic kit, the machine had taken a dislike to it. I cloned Martin’s drive to an SSD and called him, apologising profusely for jumping the gun. At least I now have a 17in test panel in my kit.
As Martin’s machine had refused to work, it had forced him into action to get it fixed. If you notice an issue with your tech, investigate it in good time, as ignoring it could be expensive. One group of repair-seekers excel at ignoring the red flags and continue to use their devices with more hope and optimism than is healthy. I’m referring to the DC-jack wigglers.
Alice’s laptop is the technical core to her small business. She does something with something else and is very successful at it. She talks about investments, synergy, hyperlocals and holistics, but she doesn’t listen to the guy in the computer shop who told her eight months earlier to bring the laptop in ASAP.
Alice is a DC-jack wiggler. Or was. After ignoring my warnings that this reasonably easy fix could prevent pain down the line, she continued wiggling, then pulling and propping it against books until the inevitable snap happened. Now, suddenly and with a hint of passive aggressiveness, it’s my fault that I can’t magic an instant repair and get her to one of the biggest deals of her career.
Alice had gambled and pulled three mouldy lemons on the fruit-machine of fate. The actual fault was that the positive power line had come away from the DC jack, an easy repair with some wire-strippers and a soldering iron. By waiting (and wiggling), she’d managed to establish a connection for power on, but months of this strategy snapped the positive pin off the DC jack, separated the barrel from the charging lead and left it wedged inside the machine.
This was repairable, but not in time for her meeting. I asked about her spare machine and received the same blank look that I get from 99% of small business owners, so if this is you, listen up. Get a second machine, a decent refurb would be ideal. Load it up with your software and experiment with how easy it is to become operational with files, emails and the one that no-one ever thinks about: internet favourites and bookmarks. This dry run should highlight if you’re hoarding on your other machine without backup, synchronisation or cloud access. Don’t think of this as a pointless exercise, as it could save your bacon. Do you really want your recorded cause of death to be “Forgot 365 password”?
Haunting experiences
Unlike my esteemed RWC colleagues, I don’t delve into the corporate or enterprise world, but I do have many clients that are sole traders or micro-businesses – and we become their IT department. The American writer Jodi Picoult summarises my experiences: “We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.” The moment I explored Sam’s laptop, I knew we were in trouble.
She’d owned the business for a few years, having bought it from the previous owner who had retired overseas. The laptop was part of the sale and came pre-loaded with all the software required to keep the business afloat. This isn’t an unusual scenario, as second-user machines often come pre-loaded with various bits of software, but if this sounds familiar to you, then I urge you to consider the purchase. Who owns the software? Do you have valid licences for up dates and patches? Could you re-install that program onto a new drive when the cat accidentally knocks the machine off the dining room table? Sam’s answers were all negative – and her dining room table was a bit scratched.
Getting Sam’s machine running required a new SSD as her Windows licence was some ex-enterprise version that can’t call home for activation. She’ll need a new code. As the machine had an old enterprise version of Office, we can replace that with a 365 subscription for an easy fix. Now the tough stuff. Sam kept all her files in Dropbox, but the account wasn’t registered to her business domain. It belonged to a Gmail address of the previous owner now sunning himself beachside at the
Costa Don’t-Give-A-Toss, and every attempt to contact him failed. I also worked out that the business domain and hosting wasn’t in her name either, but with a bit of admin, this can be resolved. Be reassured that there was an expensive light at the end of the tunnel as the main software for her business – also not in her name – would only cost £4K to purchase.
I have a lot of sympathy for Sam. Twenty years later, we still make mistakes in our business (as you’ve read), and her focus was on the future rather than the past. In the post-DVD software world, keep an eye on licences, accounts and downloads to ensure you’re self-sufficient in the event of a reinstall or new machine. However, the real moral of this tale is that cats and computers don’t mix.
“Alice had pulled three mouldy lemons on the fruit-machine of fate”