OLPC in Sandy Lake

The Repair Shop: Fixing 30 XO Laptop keyboards

By Michael Mak, OLPC Intern

With the 50 laptops that we brought from Sandy Lake, the first question the K-NET team and I asked was: “what now?” Most of the laptops had broken keyboards, some with broken screens. However, many were operable with the latest update and only needed to be repaired. So we ordered 30 keyboards (only 30 were in stock at www.ilovemyxo.com) and started our quest to repair 30 laptops in less than five days.

XO Laptops

Learning how to repair the laptops is no easy task. The 20 minute step-by-step tutorial wasn’t too hard to follow, but I had to repeatedly pause and figure out the different screw locations and components. When near to removing the keyboard, the silver tape that helped to hold the keyboard to the laptop kept peeling off and wouldn’t stick to the new keyboard. In addition, it was extremely difficult to snap certain components together – I cut my thumb accidently during my second repair. Certain screws were difficult to screw in; I had to replace quite a few with the spare located on the top piece. The first laptop that I fixed took 2 hours to learn, the second only an hour. As I got more and more practice I was able to improve my time; by the 15^th, I could fix one under 15 minutes. It became a sort of a game to me, where I wanted to beat my previous time!

Taking an XO Apart

However, team work was what completed the task. I taught Chris McKay, the co-op student at K-NET how to fix the XO and he was such a quick learner. He completed the rest of the laptops during a weekend, and by Monday we had all the laptops repaired. This repair job will allow students in another community to experiment, learn, and grow with these XOs. The XO has a very simple construction that with practice, can easily be repaired with replacement parts. However, beware of sharp parts and broken screws; they can make a repair job frustrating!

Chris at work!

Overall, repairing the XOs was so much fun - I learned a lot about the internal mechanisms and hardware, and I know that a student will love working with these XOs!