if void then

With Nicky's old laptop lacking one of the wee strut things found to stop car bonnets from capturing people looking at the engines, I used materials to hand. The rightmost socket was connected with a small ribbon cable attached to two ZIF clamps but where the cable was glued to the actual HDD case, not even a tray, so it came out along with the drive when I fished it out to back it up when this stopped working a few months ago. With the aid of a thin plectrum it was unpeeled and replaced today, ready for this and the driveless shell of mine to be dropped off at the Remakery in case they can use any bits of either; perhaps the DVD±RW drives or some of the memory. I am keenly aware that this currently leaves the household with no functioning optical drive, which I will sort out this week. We're now also out of 32-bit Windows so I might as well also donate the Canoscan 3200F, for which no-one has ever devised a 64-bit-compatible driver. On the positive front, despite having had to go for something with a small screen as a stopgap secondhand cheap Remakeried workaround laptop until probably winterfeast, it seems markedly quicker than my old one and can hopefully be persuaded to allow the recording of music, which means I could also sell/donate two other pieces of wastefully inefficient and outdated audiogubbins.