So there I was, at the bar, knee-deep in a pint of Sprite, when my phone got all vibrate-y. As I am wont to do, I reached for the phone, but my arm hit the pint of Sprite, and spilled it onto my laptop. I was originally there for the food and the internets, but all of a sudden I was frantically shutting my computer down and blotting the very sticky, sugary beverage from the keyboard.

FUCK ME!

The computer is an Apple MacBook Pro, and as you can imagine, isn’t among the cheaper of computers out there, so I was a little agitated. As in, a shitload. But I calmly dabbed and blotted as much liquid as I could from the external surfaces, and promptly went home to see if I was out $2000 or not.

The internets told me that attempting to completely disassemble one of these things had already been done, and so I got to work, following the instructions closely. That is, until I got to the point where I was to unscrew 56 teeny tiny little screws that hold the keyboard to the underside of the main body of the computer. And, luckily I did NOT have that size of screwdriver.

DUDE!!!

Well, now what? I went up and asked a roommate if he had one, and the answer to that was NO, so I called the closest person I knew, Brent, who lives about 20 blocks away.

Me: “Hey man, do you have a teeny tiny philips-head screwdriver, like for glasses?”

Brent: “I sure do.”

Me: “You’re not gonna believe this shit, but I just spilled Sprite on my computer and I need to rip it apart. Can I come and grab that thing?”

Brent: “Come on up…we’ll be here.”

Awesome! So I rode up to Brent n Kate’s place, shot the shit for a bit and headed back home to finish the overhaul.

Now, I’ve torn apart many things in my life, and I’ve pissed my parents off many times by rendering many a ball-point pen into pea shooters and then leaving them right there on the table for all to see, but…I’ve never ripped into a computer before. Certainly not a laptop. I’ve overhauled many a bike worth well over $5000 before and run into troubles now and again, but the computer? That shit scared me. Both because I hadn’t done it before, and the cost of failure was pretty much astronomical. See, I don’t work on bikes anymore for a living. I now do web development, and in order to work, I need my computer, so if the computer don’t work, then neither do I, and so how do I replace a computer when I need one to scrape up the cash to get one and all that spiral-y shit, zeemzane?

Oh shit…

Well, 56 stupid teeny tiny screws and 4 Q-tips later, I was ready to struggle getting it all back together. And that’s what I did. Struggled, bigtime! I had a bitch of a time getting a couple of the ribbon cables back into their proper spots, and I was certain that I’d permanently chowdered up the connection for one of the fans, and OH YEAH, it was starting to look like I was going to have one screw left over. Not the end result I’d originally been looking for. However, I fixed the fan connection, got the ribbon cable in place and found the missing screw hole and got it all together.

And you know what? My computer fired right up without a problem after all that. Granted, the warranty is now voided, but the damn thing works again! I took pictures too, but I’ll post those later, because I just got done and it’s 4am and I need to crash out.

If you or your friends need help digging into your unibody MacBook Pro, give me a holler.

Popularity: 4% [?]