Apparently I Am a Tech Genius!

Not really, but I certainly felt like one when hubby and I successfully changed out the battery in my old tablet and it actually worked afterwards(!).  In fact, we were feeling so technically proficient that after the tablet experiment we took the hard drive out of an old laptop and killed it (the hard drive) with a hammer.

In the case of the tablet, the battery was nearing five years old and draining really fast so I ordered a battery online for $20 then we watched a video on how to change it out and it was actually pretty easy to do.  I was really surprised that the tablet turned on when we put it back together since we had never done something like this before; hopefully this battery holds a longer charge and keeps the tablet alive for a few more years!

In the case of the laptop, it was one I had had for years.  It was an early prototype for the newer Dell XPS and was top of the line back in the day.  But I never really liked it so it sat in the closet for years and when I took it out recently to reset it so I could give it away, it wouldn't turn on.  Again, we used YouTube to figure out how to remove the battery thinking to replace the battery so it would work again but after we took the battery out, I went online only to find the battery cost $199!  Yikes.  Since I didn't want to put so much money into a very old laptop, I decided to remove the hard drive since it still had my old files on it which I don't want to share with anyone who may end up with the laptop, put it back together sans the hard drive but with the old, nonfunctional battery, and we will send it to the Philippines where they can fix pretty much anything for very low prices.

The moral of this story is that you can actually do many technical things that you may not think you can do with only the help of a few YouTube videos.  If you have old tech devices that you want to bring back to life with cheap online components, give it a shot!