I’ve had this PSV 1000 for I don’t even know how long now — probably 8-plus years. Officially it’s been abandoned, but I picked it up again recently. And found the battery seems to be shot. Sony says the PSV battery isn’t replaceable, but swapping it is still dead simple. I remember Sony even put out battery replacement instructions for the PSV 2000 later on.

So one day I accidentally dumped a bottle of Oriental Leaf tea right onto the touchpad area of my ThinkPad X250… After that the buttons started acting up for no discernible reason, and after thinking it over I decided to replace the touchpad. They sell them on eBay, though most buyers are probably X240 owners. When I went to buy one as an X250 user the seller was actually surprised — he thought I had an X240 and kept stressing that the screw positions on this thing are slightly off from the X240’s. There aren’t many guides online for swapping this thing, and most of the ones that exist are long-winded and unclear. After doing it myself, I found it’s stupidly simple…

I picked up this ThinkPad X230 a year ago, and I’ve been tinkering with it on and off since. Swapped the SSD, swapped in a bigger drive, even swapped the screen. This time it was the cooling system’s turn. The machine itself doesn’t actually run that hot, and I can’t feel the heat or hear the fan, but the monitoring told another story. 55°C the moment it boots, fan spinning non-stop, and it shoots up to 60–70°C within minutes of hooking up an external monitor. The fan alone was pulling 10W, which was murdering my battery life. So I decided to tear it down, repaste, and clean out the dust. There are plenty of teardown guides out there; I followed this one. Disassembly went smoothly. Then I found the problem… there’s a huge gap between the southbridge chip and the heatpipe. It was originally bridged with a thermal pad, which I idiotically wiped off, and the thing was dried out anyway. Which means unless I slather on 0.4mm worth of thermal paste, there’s no way to guarantee proper contact between the heatpipe and the southbridge. The fix: thick paste, a thermal pad, or a copper shim. I went with the copper shim. Lucky for me there’s a decent shop here in Zhengzhou that does cooling and mod work. Grabbed a shim and some paste from them and got back to it.