I had a nice scare today with my Dell Laptop dying on me here in Germany at the conference. As usual things will go wrong only when you’re on the road. My laptop screen switch decided it didn’t want to work any longer – you know the little nib that controls the shutting off the display when you close the lid on your laptop. The nib wouldn’t give any more and whenever the lid was closed it didn’t spring back. It started failing earlier today but with some wiggling it’d come back out – until later today it no longer popped back and more or less froze. The machine would simply stay in sleep mode and not come out of it when the opened. Fiddling with the power switch I was able to get the machine to fire back up, but the screen still would not work. I was able to run with an external display luckily.

Later I started to try and unscrew the laptop to see if I could get inside to ‘unstick’ the little lever. I realized quickly that getting it off that way was not in the cards. Luckily I realized that the power buttons and area around it lifts off apparently without unscrewing anything – the whole area can be unsnapped carefully. I was able to get the whole thing lifted off and reseat the lever properly on the spring underneath the panel. Snap it back in and now I have a working machine again.

But still – this was one hell of a scary moment and it’s still not quite right with the nib still sticking a bit. I’m not closing the top for the time being if I can remember that.

Why is it that Murphy’s law ALWAYS kicks in when you’re on the road. My server went down earlier today apparently due to a minor hardware failure, followed by my ISP making an unannounced server move. I need my server for a few demos in the sessions, so this was yet another scary moment.

And here I thought the 11 hour timelag/jetlag was the only thing to worry about <g>…