Stupid laptop tricks

[sm8000]

This morning my supervisor showed me a laptop that somebody made a serious alteration to. They had taken what appears to be a telephone wall jack, bolted it to the side of the laptop, and ran wires from the inside to connect to it. We have no idea who did it or if they still work here, this is a fairly old laptop.

Pics of the carnage here:

http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230001.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230002.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230003.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230004.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230005.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230006.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230007.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230009.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230010.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230011.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P2230013.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P6300003.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P6300009.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P6300010.JPG
http://pics.chronicstupor.com/users/sm8000/P6300013.JPG

 

[beanman101283]

but....why?

 

[PhantomLimb]

Looks brutal, I'm wondering if that hackjob actually works

 

[Rune75]

but....why?

Im guessing that they F'ed up the internal connection some how, went to the hardware store and like the man said, attached a wall jack to keep the modem working. I would be interested in checking out the internals of the lappy to see if they soldered the wires from the old modem jack to the wall jack or just twisted them together.

 

[sm8000]

I've found out that many Toshiba laptops used a rather flimsy modem connector, I'm guessing something like an X-jack on some PCMCIA ethernet cards, that could break very easily. This is probably what happened here.

Without having opened the thing up yet (and we probably won't) it looks like the wires connecting the new modem are the original wires there for the original modem. The bolts you see attaching the new modem have the wires connected to their heads' undersides via Y-shaped connectors.