TALKS ABOUT TORX

Dick Pountain/Idealog 276/06 July 2017 14:44

I've decided that I would like you all to refer to me as an Essayist rather than a Columnist from now on. After attending a stimulating talk by Brian Dillon at the London Review bookshop the other day, I was lead to realise that, in a certain light, the stuff with which I populate this column looks quite a bit like an essay, and that essays are way cooler than columns. So I would very much like to be added somewhere near the bottom of a long list that starts with Montaigne, Hazlitt, Orwell, Sontag and Woolf.

Dillon's definition of an essay was a  kind of text that starts by chronicling some everyday triumph or defeat, then draws from this some conclusion of universal validity. So, here goes. We were giving a dinner party for some old friends, when sometime between the espressos and the petit fours all our lights went out. Flipping the circuit breaker restored the power, so there was no continuing short anywhere, but these outages recurred several times over the next week. Our ancient electrics box contains five separately fused circuits, sequential removal of which enabled me to isolate the fault to one quadrant of the house, namely the living room, and soon after we identified and replaced the offending wall socket, which had been sporadically arcing, thanks to drops of moisture coming from a blocked gutter (now unblocked).

But before that happy day, one of these outages had caused a secondary problem of far more relevance to this column/essay. The morning after, my Lenovo Yoga laptop wouldn't switch on. Stone dead, no amount of button pressing would cause it to boot or even to flicker a light. I first of all wondered whether the power spikes had fried its battery, but after some Googling I discovered that it's a well-known problem not only for the Yoga but also for many other modern laptops, including some iMacs. It's due to some sort of dumb-ass design decisions in their internal charging circuitry and BIOS firmware, and the cure is to disconnect and then reconnect the battery. Except that on my Yoga (and various iMacs, etc) the batteries are no longer user-accessible via a trapdoor as they used to be not all that long ago.

Instead the bottom of my Yoga presented a seamless expanse of smooth black alloy, held down by a dozen tiny screws bearing fiendishly oriental star symbols instead of slots. These I learned are called Torx T5 fasteners, so off I went the the local Maplins and bought a Torx 5 screwdriver. Brian Dillon had remarked that the structure of an essay often starts from a very narrow topic and then widens out toward its conclusion. Few household utensils are narrower than a Torx 5 screwdriver.

I discovered that a Torx screwdriver does work rather beautifully - far more positive and grippy than Philips or Hex - and soon I had dish full of the little buggers and an open laptop whose PCB is a thing of greater beauty still. Mediterranean Blue in colour, thickly covered in the tiniest imaginable components, connected by shimmering silver freeways like a relief map of some futuristic city. The battery was completely embedded in this stunning landscape, and its plug was one of those tiny components.

By using two pairs of medical tweezers and a magnifying glass I was able to unplug the battery, only breaking off one of the two plastic locking lugs in the process. Then I pressed the reset button and the BIOS messages did indeed appear briefly. Then I replugged the battery (adding a judicious patch of gaffer tape) and rebooted, and there was my working world again, wholly intact. And since I'm already on blood pressure medication, with no major ill-effects on my health.

So, there's a small quotidian triumph, and now to widen it out into conclusions of universal validity. Firstly, designers of electronic equipment who believe their design so bullet-proof that they don't need to provide user access need to be disabused of this belief, perhaps using some kinds of medieval persuasion technology. Secondly, do buy a whole set of Torx screwdrivers, only a few quid in Maplins. Thirdly, don't be afraid to fiddle inside your laptop: it's only a human invention after all, and not in any way magic or supernatural (though it is terribly fragile). Fourthly, perhaps you *should* be afraid to fiddle with your mains supply - having once survived a 9000 volt shock, I'm unusually free of this extremely useful and protective fear. And finally, among that illustrious list of essayists to which I aspire to belong, among Montaigne, Hazlitt, Orwell, Sontag and Woolf, not one of them could tell a Torx screwdriver from a bare bodkin...