My laptop, it’s getting better!

Still typing this on a Chromebook. Whatever.

Hello fellow Internet users and Instagram stalkers, my laptop situation is getting actually MUCH better.

I tried some troubleshooting tonight, see what would happen. And, actually, a huge sigh was let out. My laptop came on once tonight, for about 1 second! I heard whatever usually comes on when my laptop starts up (the fan most likely), and yea, it came on!

And, yesterday, I made a misunderstanding. When I posted to the iFixit answers forum, someone said, it’s probably the I/O board. I honestly thought the I/O board was the logic board. Wrong! It’s a small board on the right hand side of the back of the laptop, where the headphone jack, 1 USB port, and the power plug is. Replacements for that fetch only $100, so that’s a huge relief, from the expected $650 for a replacement board. Yea, that still costs a good bit of money, but 6.5x less than a logic board.

I troubleshooted the issue further, and I think it’s come down to a faulty I/O to Logic Board cable, or connector. When the I/O to Logic Board cable is disconnected on either end, my laptop’s charger light will stay in the last state it was operating in. When the cable is connected, the light immediately turns off. Maybe some of my connectors, the board itself, or the cable gave up the ghost. Luckily, cable replacements are around $25, and if Apple repairs my board(s) correctly, I’m pretty sure unsoldering the two connectors and resoldering two new ones will cost around $15. This is some really great hope, and at most, the repair will cost around $150.

Phew. Like, a really big phew.

At this point, I’m not ordering any replacement parts, or fully jumping to conclusions. I want someone who is a certified professional to actually say what’s wrong. I said last night the logic board failed, and well…it didn’t. Just the I/O board failed. While I tried booting my laptop without the board connected, and it failed, it’s probably since the battery inside is dead. I’ll try tomorrow with a charged battery, to see if I get any hope. What a ride this has been.

Unfortunately, no one else in my house has a 13 inch MacBook Air, and honestly, I’m not going to start going through smaller and larger laptops for board cables, as they may be rated for different voltages, etc. But, I’m just happy that things are getting better in what was originally a horrible situation.

Alright, skipping over my laptop dilemma, there’s some more site updates right around the corner. Project pages will be mainly redone, with the year of the project tagged along, and to pretty much make unification rock. I’ll be posting more here, and trying to organize posts some. There’s also a decent amount of projects that I’ll need to upload, mainly the Unity, Python, and Java 2016 projects, all to GitHub and here. Thankfully, I don’t store those on my non-functional laptop!

Expect more posts in the future, regarding my laptop. And other things.