Friend performs laptop computer 'brain swap'

SOLOLÁ — With a poor power connection, my external hard drive was virtually useless. But Wednesday evening, my Guatemalan friend and Viña Studios co-worker, Alejandro, resuscitated it and installed it inside my laptop — entering a dark netherworld I would never have dared to trod alone.

Without a candle to light our way and without first properly scrubbing for “brain surgery,” we embarked. “Have you done this before?” I nervously asked Alejandro. He grinned and said, “No,” but he showed me some diagrams of my Apple iBook G4’s insides that he found online.

Thus we disassembled my thee-year-old laptop, removing dozens of different sized screws, the keyboard, the track pad, front and back plastic covers and at least two thin metal casing panels before reaching our target: the hard drive.

Few Americans deign to open the hood of their car and change the oil, but Guatemalan males seem to have an inordinate confidence that they can master their car’s mechanics as well as any electronic device. When a friend’s stereo CD tray got stuck, he whipped out a screwdriver and had the stereo in pieces on his dining room table. (Eventually, he did need help.)

After two failed attempts Wednesday evening and a few anxious moments I began to wonder whether we had ruined my perfectly good computer. But in the end we managed to do two things I never have dreamed possible: We made use of a “useless” hard drive, and with the “brain swap,” we tripled my laptop’s storage, extending its life.

Throughout the several hours-long “surgery” I also got to know Alejandro better. Turns out he had disassembled laptop computers before, but not a Mac laptop. Also, he said, during a one-hour high school test, he had to reassemble a desktop computer that had been completely taken apart.

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The surgery wasn’t without some side effects. After coffee break on Thursday I returned to my desk and to my horror heard the computer screeching loudly. I quickly fetched the doctor: “Houston, we have a problem.” We hustled upstairs to the operating room, Alejandro carefully carrying my laptop and me alongside with a bottle held upside down, representing a hospital IV.

Within minutes, he discovered the problem: A wire to a speaker had gotten too close to a screwhead and gotten pinched when we screwed everything back together.