Due to taking IT Auditing class in Baruch on Saturday, I started swimming to get healthier and expend more energy (which I may write up in a future post)! On a nice March day, after I finished swimming at the Flushing Recreational Center, I accidentally dropped my water bottle and broke the latch that kept the cap from leaking water everywhere. In the crowded locker room, I hastily stuffed most of my belongings into my bag and went down to the lobby to fix myself up. With my bottle at the top of my bag, water spilled throughout my bag and onto my belongings at the bottom. For someone who has owned random electrical devices, the first thing on mind to do was to turn everything off immediately to prevent the insides from short-circuiting!
As soon as I got home, I took my Kindle out and noticed that its screen would not turn on. The first remedy in mind was to use rice and hope that it would dry off all of the innards. So I followed through on the idea and threw my Kindle HDX and 3DS inside the rice container for awhile. Unfortunately, luck was not on my side as the Kindle’s screen would not turn on. And so I checked the innards and opened it up using the iFixit guide. (Check these guys out. Their guides and tools have so much utility allowing a tinkerer to fix and experiment with hardware!) My warranty was already voided because I’ve rooted it and the water damage didn’t help at all, so it was the next best option. My 3DS turned out surprisingly okay despite being drenched. Good on Nintendo!
Sunday followed quickly after, and I left it in the rice container again to dry a bit more in hopes that the Kindle’s screen would light up. After charging and turning it on, it made normal noises and the touch screen also functioned. I was able to play around with PowerAmp and some other applications, but it was really difficult because there was no back-light. This was the true problem and it was probably a circuit that shorted due to water getting into crevices that should not have been accessible. I thought a bit and had a few options available to me…
With these considerations that arose from the problem:
- Send it to Amazon - My warranty was not valid as it was water damage caused by my own negligence. Contacting them confirmed that I could not do anything.
- Hire my local shop to buy the part and fix it - This may as well have run me the cost of buying a new tablet. Labor cost along with a new replacement screen would be close in price to the next option.
- Buying a whole new Kindle Fire HDX - This would cost me my settings and various comfortable configurations that I was used to. The tablet still seemed to work despite the backlight being broken, why trash it?
- Buy the part off of EBay and fix it myself - A huge gamble with the problem that could not have even been the screen itself but it was likeliest option. It would also give me more insight into how various devices are really assembled and things work.
After the night passed, based on various Googling, a part of the screen definitely burned out because the back-light did not turn on. So the strategy was to disassemble everything and remove the screen, but a screw got stripped. The bane of my time for a good 15 minutes, attempting to remove the screw was a huge annoyance. Despite using various screwdriver heads, the screw stripped more and stayed stuck. Glue was also present, holding the screen to the rest of the case making removal more difficult. Eventually I was able to separate it and cut myself because the screen was thin and fragile. Thankfully, the screen protector prevented screen shards from scattering everywhere while I scrapped off the glued parts. You can see some shards below from the picture of my HDX with the screen protector! Now with the tough parts separate, it was time to order the replacement screen.
I purchased the screen replacement on Ebay on Monday of the following week and received the screen on Friday of the same week! It took some fiddling to get the ribbon cables to fit properly into the motherboard but everything managed to go fit well because I had already disassembled the HDX. Work backwards and make sure all screws are accounted for! A little test was done by putting the screen partially into the casing and pressing the power button. To my happy surprise, it turned on and I was ecstatic! In the end, I saved $60 and revived my Kindle Fire HDX, along with having fun tinkering with my devices. Who knew that the downtime of one device could cause such a huge impact on the way we deal with daily routine?
My tablet is my notebook and my media consumption device. Instead of using a laptop or a desktop, I can, in the comfort of my bed, watch all sorts of media. Crunchyroll, YouTube, or streaming videos from my network. Redditing from my bed. Reading various stories and news. It’s powerful enough to play 1080p video files on my computer while my phones struggled to even get a few frames running. The speakers are loud enough to fill my entire room with the music from my playlists! When you have a portable device with a screen size smaller than a laptop but bigger than the size of a phone screen, it changes the way that you can go about approaching the internet! Though you can just say that it’s a bigger phone or a smaller laptop, the portability, size, and power of these devices allow you to strike a better balance than other devices! And I’m happy to use my tablet on the everyday!
Extra credit to anyone who knows the character in the background!
Hint: He’s from an amazing 3DS game!