I put my Framework on top of a slippery, angled glass surface some weeks ago. Turned away from it, then a few minutes later heard a loud BANG as it hit the floor.

This dent in the corner meant that I couldn’t close the laptop all the way– the corner was keeping it roughly 2mm open. So what could I do? Some random commenter on the Framework forum suggested a vise grip… Could it be that simple?

Actually yes, it kind of was

Wrapped it in Kapton tape to avoid damaging the finish too much…

Then thoroughly crushed it under a metal vise grip. In two passes it was all but flat.

Unfortunately this inner “liner” also got crushed; where there’s supposed to be a seam, there’s now material.

A Dremel rather effectively took care of that, destroying it even at the lowest speed setting.

The interior frame was also slightly dented. A little more Kapton tape and some pliers bent them right back into shape.

Here’s the finished result! The vise did leave an imprint behind in certain places. The very tip of the metal was just crushed, and the metal stress marks from the original bend are extremely clear. But overall, almost all of the metal was properly bent back, the laptop closes again, and we’re back in business.

Trackpad

My second attempt at repairing a failing trackpad in two different laptops has ended in failure once more.

The physical button no longer clicks correctly. The click was failing to actually depress on the left side of the trackpad, and pressed were often outright getting discarded.

This trackpad has a single button in the middle. I tried adding some painters tape to the middle to encourage the button to depress easier. This makes it easy to press from the sides, but harder to depress from the middle.

It also wholly fails to solve the actual problem, which is that physical button presses are simply ignored ~2/3 of the time.

Trackpads continue to be my enemy. I miss my red ThinkPad nipple.

RAM Upgrade

I took the time to get in there and install the RAM that was $130 off some weeks back…

Now Bazzite allocates 9GB on boot. I am genuinely clueless as to what could possibly consume this much, considering it was already eating an absurd 5GB with my previous 32GB. It gives me the impression that something’s seriously wrong with the OS.

Not to mention that half the reason I bought this upgrade was because its kernel leaks over 7 gigabytes of memory over the course of two weeks.

It turns out that the downside of an immutable OS is that it’s nigh-impossible to actually boot a custom kernel, meaning I can’t debug what exactly is leaking so much. I’ll make a 10:1 bet it’s amdgpu, though, same as I’ll bet amdgpu is what keeps causing the random freezes every couple of weeks.