On how a girl started binging a YouTube channel during lockdown and found happiness
This is a repost of an old blog post I had in another blog that has since been taken offline. The latest time that backup was edited was August 2021, so I guess happy birthday to my entry?
This was supposed to be a tips and tricks compilation for people who want to start on refurbishing, but I guess I had an overdue itch on writing one of these. Whoops!
Many people are scared of attempting to open up their stuff because they are afraid they are going to break it. Honestly, I understand; when my computer was getting sluggish, slow and would overheat, I took it to a repair shop just to get it cleaned. When my PS3 stopped booting, I took it to the same repair shop just to get a check-up (faulty PSU btw, Sony timer is real 2401).
If my PS3 failed nowadays, I would probably just get my trusty screwdriver and get down to business myself. I won't speak of my laptop because I already opened it myself, swapped the HDD for an SSD myself, and re-pasted it myself. It was a mess to find a teardown guide because, apparently, the model number changes between regions.
No, I don't mean "the part of the code that refers to the region". The whole code changed. Yes, fun times indeed.
But the thing that really motivated me to go down the teardown rabbit hole was not a motivation to save money or the right to repair movement. It was simply the YouTube Algorithm showing me the new hot thing that was trending during the lockdown: Odd Tinkering.
After watching like 10 videos about console repair in a row, the algorithm picked up on it and started showing me other people who made repairs. First, it was consoles; then, it was old laptops. And at one point, there was one vlogger who claimed to have started in high school, picking broken iMacs for cheap and repairing them for a profit.
Not only they made it look easy, but they also seemed to shrug it off as something you can get into with a tight budget. So I bit the bullet, looked up how to get started on console repairs and the writing was on the wall:
The first thing you should do is to start by tearing down your own devices and cleaning them up. This is not only to get practice; I can assure you, anything you have that is 5+ years old is in dire need of some RSD (Rubbing alcohol, Soap and Dusting off).
And so I did: I reached for my trusty PSP1000 (which is somehow still working like the first day) and I opened it up. As it turned out, opening a PSP is kind of a challenge due to the casette-like UMD loader, so I decided to only take the front cover and the buttons.
Fast forward a few months, and I see this video. Since the lockdown was basically over in Spain, it was the perfect chance for me to just stroll around on my own cashies and see if I could find something that caught my attention. And to my surprise, I found an Xbox 360 for €20 because the disc tray wouldn't open. A quick Google search told me everything I needed to know, so I was ready to go.
When I opened it, I quickly caught onto two things:
- the outer case was disgustingly greasy;
- the insides stank of sweat and cigarettes.
I had to make an emergency trip to the grocery store for perfurmed alcohol (hold onto this thought), regular alcohol, Q-tips, brushes and iced coffee. I cleaned the outer case thoroughly (throwing out a whole tree's worth of paper towels along the way), brushed the dust away, cleaned any posible residue with the regular alcohol and sipped some iced coffee because it was the middle of July.
Regarding the perfumed alcohol, there are two reasons why I bought it. On the one hand, it was perfumed, so it wouldn't be so aggresive on my nostrils since I had to rub a big surface with it. On the other hand, it was alcohol, and many people recommend you to disinfect any second-hand electronics you buy off places like your neighbour's yard sale or cashies. Yes, even before lockdown.
This is also a good moment to comment on this. If you're an electrician, you probably knew about these little monsters anyway; if you're not, please let me do the presentations.
That thing is called a Torx screw. Apparently, the idea behind this design is that you can apply more force than you could with a Phillips screwdriver, so you can tighten it further. In practice, however, it mostly comes off as a humble reminder that manufacturers will always have the last laugh. And I mean, the last laugh.
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The white dot in the middle is called a tamperproof, but only because pointless distraction is nowhere as catchy. Some people call it security measure, other call it screw DRM; I call it the MasterLock screw. Different schools of thought. My advice for these is to go straight for screwdrivers labelled as "security" (they are not much more expensive than the non-security counterparts), and to buy them from on-line retailers.
Don't get me wrong, support your local business whenever you can, but this is probably not the kind of venture they are familiar with. I bought a bit-pack at my local hardware shop and still didn't get a TR8. On the bright side, it was a high quality bit-pack, nothing like poundshop screwdrivers that will deface your screws clean.
And while we're at it, this is a very important PSA I will add into the actual tips and tricks post: don't buy unknown screwdrivers at a poundshop. Low-quality screwdrivers can deface (strip) the holes in the screw, to the point where taking the screw away (now with better equipment) is out of the question. Once you get to that point, you may need to drill the whole screw away, and that's very difficult. Especially because some screwholes sit beneath actual circuit boards.
So anyway: I opened it, cleaned it, made the proper repairs and closed it. I also took my sweet time to change the paste on both the CPU and GPU; you know, the finer details. And when I booted it up, it worked better than when I started.
Thanks for reading!