My superpower is that I’m a boring person. I pay off my credit cards before they’re due. I back up all of our computers and iPhones and iPads. I keep our cars up to date on routine maintenance. I have all our spare AAs and AAAs in one drawer and I go through and throw out the dead ones. I have a binder for warranties. I rotate mattresses. I have a label maker and I use it well.
Conversely, my anxiety is my Kryptonite. The kind of fears that run through my head in the middle of the night: I think my car hesitated when I started it the other day; is the battery dying? Is it the alternator? Will I end up stranded in the parking garage at the office when I just want to get home through rush hour, and then somebody will have to come get me and I’ll have to figure out how to get a tow truck into the garage and where to tow it to? I had the smoke alarms in the house replaced the other day; is a bug going to crawl into one of them and block the sensor and make the whole lot of them start screaming at me in the middle of the night and freaking out our pets? Did I remember to lock the front door before I left the house this morning? Did I remember to floss last night? I started the clothes dryer before I went to bed; is it safe to leave it unattended or is tonight the night it’s going to catch fire and set off the smoke alarms?
Time flies – I’m surprised to remember that I bought this laptop four years ago. Jill likes having the latest-and-greatest devices, but then she hates to update the operating system or apps on them, because inevitably that changes the way things work and that makes her mad. I’m the other way around. I love older devices, I love keeping them running, and I love getting the latest software to run on them. I usually go five years between replacing my phone and about seven years between replacing my computers.
This Lenovo Legion Pro 5 has been serving me well. With its GeForce 3060, it’s a great gaming laptop. In retrospect, I really don’t like that it squeezes a numeric keypad beside the keyboard, or that the case around the keyboard is plastic, or that it’s so darned heavy (6 pounds!). But it’s done everything I’ve needed it to and it’s still going strong.
When I first got it in 2021, though, it had a problem. The keyboard is backlit, and also can have custom backlighting colors defined across four zones. I keep it one solid, consistent color, purple right now. But it’s capable of doing an animated rainbow wash across the keys every few seconds.
It would sometimes get stuck in this animated rainbow wash mode. That’s terribly distracting. And when it happened, the Lenovo configuration app would lose its ability to control the keyboard, so I couldn’t stop it.
By the end of the first year, this was happening more and more often. Fortunately my purchase had come with a year of Lenovo’s “Ultimate” warranty service. I contacted them a few days before the warranty expired, and after the weekend they sent an authorized tech to my home, where he set up shop on my dining room table and took the laptop apart and replaced the motherboard and solved the problem. I was very happy about this, because personally I hate taking laptops apart!
So, all was well … until a few months later, when I noticed something. The side of this laptop has a “webcam shutter switch” which can cut power to the webcam for privacy. I never use it – but, when the tech reassembled the laptop, he jammed the switch somehow. It was stuck. It would no longer move. The webcam was always available; I could no longer cut power to it.
There was no practical impact of this. I am meticulous about what has access to the webcam, and a light turns on whenever it’s recording. I did not need the shutter switch.
But this bothered me.
A year later – now that I’d had the laptop for two years – I got annoyed enough that I tried hard to force the switch, to see if I could get it unstuck. After a fair amount of effort, yup, it snapped and I finally got it to move again … but now it was loose, and did not actually activate the shutter. I had broken it.
This bothered me MORE. Stupid stupid stupid me, to forget that physical force is NEVER the solution for any problem involving electronics.
Still, there was no practical impact of this. I never had any use of the shutter switch anyway. The webcam worked when I wanted it to, and nothing tried to use it when I didn’t want it. Fixing this (because of course I did the research) would involve buying a replacement daughterboard (about $30) and then removing the thermal module to get to it. The thermal module is a large unit of copper heat conduits and two fans, connected to the motherboard by several screws and two tiny delicate power plugs. Removing it and then reattaching it would mean carefully cleaning off the old thermal paste and then applying new (and then what if I didn’t apply the new paste right, and it ended up making the laptop overheat and catch fire?). All this was far too invasive and delicate a procedure to undergo to fix something that I never even used, and if you remember that bit above about how long I keep computers, it’s not like I am going to try to sell this laptop while it’s still worth anything. There were a pile of reasons why I just should stop letting this bother me, and absolutely zero reasons to go ahead and do it. And therefore I heeded logic and I did nothing about it.
… for two years.
This year, 2025, has been a year of doing scary but necessary things. Of making progress on to-do lists. Of, well, “adulting,” and I hate adulting, but that’s life. So you’ll understand why I’d want to avoid adding pointless scary things to my to-do list, right?
So, imagine my surprise when I went ahead and ordered the $30 daughterboard anyway, along with a fresh tube of Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste. I set aside Saturday to do the repair in daylight, but I wanted to back up my laptop first just in case, and then when I pressed the spacebar to wake up the display it treated that as having clicked on the ‘Cancel’ button at 98% so I had to start the backup (“Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows”) again. I wasn’t ready to begin until after it got dark out. I decided to proceed anyway. I have a good workspace lamp.
Did I mention that I hate taking laptops apart? I made an exception a few months ago when my neighbor gave me a pile of old electronics to recycle, and I combined two damaged 2011 MacBook Air ultrabooks into one that works beautifully (I like Linux Mint!), but with them I had nothing to lose.
So, last night, armed with Lenovo’s very friendly and comprehensive repair guide, I set about doing the repair. The guide says I should expect to spend a total of 15-20 minutes on replacing the I/O board. In actuality, I spent a few hours on it.
But it works!
Just as I had suspected (and hoped), the case switch itself was fine; my brute force had only sheared off the switch on the daughterboard. Replacing the daughterboard fixed the problem, and now the shutter switch works again. I’ve been (gently!) clicking it back and forth just to hear the little sound it makes.
The only hitch was that one of the tiny screws inside the laptop has a stripped head so I wasn’t able to unscrew it, but that only meant I couldn’t remove an SSD cover plate that I didn’t need to remove, so there’s no need for me to worry about it. Still, I ordered “screw extractor pliers” and a kit of tiny replacement screws from Amazon, and when they arrive I’ll replace that one screw.
Because it bothers me!