A year and a half ago my laptop's hard drive died.

My laptop was struggling to boot, taking ages, until... Nothing. It was dead.

A went a whole year and a half thinking that's what had happened. I thought I would need a new hard drive.

But what I forgot to do is check the simplest of things; What if the hard drive just had a bad connection?

Fast forward to a few days ago, I decided to check just that. I carefully opened up the laptop, disconnected and reconnected the hard drive connections, started up the computer and - Bam.

It started up.

I had went a whole year and a half thinking I lost a hard drive.

It turns out these Lenovo Thinkpad T580s suffer from a ribbon cable problem, where the cable to motherboard connection is not sturdy, and the cable slowly makes its way out of the connector.

I've repaired a handful of different objects throughout my life, and 99% of the issues were very simple things. Rust. Dirt. A broken wire. A bad connection. Something of the sort. I even had a security camera I thought wasn't turning on, but in reality the activity light was just hidden by dirt, so I didn't see that it was turned on.

So when you go about doing anything, including repair, check the simple things first. Knock off the low hanging fruit before going all fancy and complicated because from my experience, more often than not you'd get quite far just doing the simple things.

• Written on my Lenovo Thinkpad T580 from my bed. Something I haven't been able to do for a year and a half, because I didn't have a thin laptop to take to bed with me.