Melbourne

I had a couple of replacements arrive this week, but I haven't had much of a chance to play around with them. One of them was an old Oppo AX7 that I had laying around. It was actually just about completely dead. I got it in 2019, and it was the first sort of decent phone I had. It was 300 bucks, and I paid for half of it, with the last place I was at paying for the other half. I used it for a couple of years, before eventually dropping it so many times that the LCD broke and a black blotch started spreading along my screen. Still worked. Until in the middle of the night it stopped working. I purchased a new screen for it in 2023 planning to fix it up and use it as a wardriving device, but I couldn't get the fucking screws out. I tried everything, and even asked 4 different people to give it a crack. Damn Oppo really don't want you fixing their phones. I did some googling, and found that someone suggested using a tiny bit of super glue to bind it to a screwdriver and get it out. That didn't work. I gave up with half (4) of the screws left. Gave it to one of the techy workers, and he managed to get 3 out using a bit of solder, but that one was forever stuck. That's actually why I bought the S8. Had it and the screen replacement in a little bag I was planning on taking to ewaste, but then old mate snapped it in half. So I got a working phone out of a broken one lmao

The other notable thing was the MacBook that was stolen. I got it back in 2018 and was the first laptop I had. In 2020 my charger broke, and I asked my last place to get me a new one. That got me some dodgy knockoff from eBay, and after a few weeks, it sparked when I plugged it into the port and charred one of the ports, burning out one of the pins on the charger. I cleaned it up a bit and borrowed a genuine one from my school which charred and burnt out too (no sparking though). I deemed it mostly a write off and put it in its box and kept it in some drawers, intending to replace the I/O board when I had $150 to spare. When I moved in here, I decided to order the cheapest eBay charger I could find, just to see if it would happen again and determine if it was worth replacing the I/O board. It worked, and never had another issue. Funnily enough though, in 2018 a kid at a previous placement got shitty with me and scratched the back up quite a bit, so I also basically got an upgrade out of this one too.

Although oddly, both of these arrived completely filthy. The phone was bought from CeX and the MacBook from some refurbishment shop. I can understand why the person Hocking them wouldn't clean them, but why wouldn't the shop? I'm not a huge fan of fingerprints all of my screens. Takes 2 seconds, and a 3 cent alcohol wipe (or free with a zinger meal) to take the condition up a few notches