Recently my son’s laptop keyboard reached the end of its life. It’s only two years old, but he’s a regular gamer, so the WASD keys were shot.

At first, we took it to the local Microcenter that we’d bought it from, since we also got their repair plan, and it still had a month left on the warranty. Alas, they had a dire shortage of repair labor and were backed up for fully two months.

So we took things into our own hands. I went online, ordered the replacement keyboard part — and three Saturdays ago we opened up the machine to fix it ourselves.

I do this a lot. I’ve been cracking open laptops and replacing busted parts for almost twenty years, so it doesn’t faze me. I’ve mostly done pretty simple repairs — like replacing keyboards, power units, RAM and hard drives.

All this hardware hacking has taught me quite a bit about the state of repair-age in laptops today. I’ve learned that some machines are easier to repair than others, because they were designed to be opened up and to have components swapped in and out. Gaming laptops like my son’s? Usually quite repairable: They’re roomier inside and the parts are pretty modular, because it’s assumed that gamers might want to upgrade components. But many other devices I’ve owned were designed for skinniness — like Mac laptops in recent years, or Ipads and many phones. Those things are nightmares, and occasionally flat-out impossible to repair: Components aren’t modular, or are glued in place (to make things sleeker, but thereby also making them unremovable). Kyle Wiens and the folks at iFixit have been doing superb rankings of the fixability of devices for years now.

Anyway, the point is, when I decided we’d simply fix my son’s laptop, I knew we could do it.

But the more important thing I’ve learned from years of repairing laptops?

It feels great.

After all, the default mode of today’s electronics is planned obsolescence, right?

You’re not supposed to fix things. The manufacturer would generally prefer that, at the first malfunction, you toss their device the garbage so they can sell you a new one. It’s another reason they make their devices so hard to repair — as with that noxious gluing-together of components, or their refusal to openly publish repair guides, or the many other anti-repair moves they’ve made over the years, like cutting off the supply of parts. (The FTC recently documented all these “anticompetive practices related to repair markets”. Not all manufacturers are so wretched, mind you: Dell’s quite reasonable.)

In essence, electronics manufacturers encourage “learned helplessness”. At the first sign of trouble, we’re supposed to throw our hands up in the air.

In this context, the act of fixing something feels delightfully rebellious. You’re doing something in direct opposition to The Man.

Better yet, repairing your own electronics is great for the environment. Globally, we toss out over 48 million tons of e-waste a year, only 20% of which is recycled. The rest goes into landfill — often in countries in the global south — where it leaches poisonous metals like mercury and lead into the soil and water. (To say nothing of the enormous use of water, energy and materials to make new gewgaws in the first place.)

So repairing something yourself means you’re helping to make the world somewhat less of a toxic ashtray. You’re a rebel and you’re ecological. 🤘🤖

But the best part of fixing one’s electronics, really, is that it confers an intoxicating sense of competence.

It can be terrifying at first! With this recent laptop repair that my son and I dove into, we discovered that the keyboard was the hardest part to replace. It required gutting the entire laptop like a fish. (Great design, ASUS: You made the component mostly likely to break — the keyboard — the most onerous to remove.) The upshot is that when we were sitting there with two dozen laptop parts splayed across our kitchen table, it was totally intimidating. What if we screw this up?

But it also felt badass: Okay, we’re doing this. It helps that, over the years, I’ve bought various tools from iFixit — little plastic spludgers designed to help you safely crack open obstinate plastic cases of laptops, multiheaded screwdrivers designed specifically for the weird types of screws one finds within. On top of the fact that tools are just fun things to possess, having the right ones at hand confers additional confidence when you’re removing two dozen crucial components from a laptop.

And you also get a decent lesson in resilience, doing this sort of fix-it work. Things don’t always go according to plan, and you have to improvise. When my son and I disconnected the tiny, stamp-sized wifi card, the little pignose connectors unclipped easily; but when time came to reattach them, they were so weirdly stubborn we worried we’d somehow damaged them during removal. (We hadn’t; it just required unexpectedly large pressure from a pair of needlenose pliers to get ’em back on.)

At another point during the disassembly, we accidentally broke one-half of a latching mechanism for a thin-film cable. Crap. When we reassembled it, we had to consider what to do. We briefly pondered using electric tape to secure it firmly in place. Instead, my son experimentally tugged on the seated cable and decided that the one un-broken latch was holding it pretty firmly; regular everyday bumping-and-handling was unlikely to dislodge it. So we decided against the electrical tape, figuring it might introduce complications of its own.

And we were right: In the end, the reassembled laptop worked fine.

The point is, repairing stuff requires you to exercise judgment, and make decisions that have real stakes. That’s scary, but it feels quite nice too.

So now my son’s keyboard is back up and running, and with luck, should last another two years. We avoided creating a piece of e-waste; gave a machine a new lease on life; and reaffirmed a sense of basic competence.

It’s an experience I recommend. As I wrote in a piece for Wired — almost ten years ago — about the art of repair …

We started off upgrading a machine — and wound up upgrading ourselves.