The optimism is almost impressive. Green board, crusty ports, and he thought a fresh battery would fix it. That's like trying to revive a car that's been at the bottom of a lake by just putting air in the tires. Some people see a tech problem and their brain just picks the cheapest possible part to blame.

Ugh, I keep a sealed backup tub for exactly this reason (learned the hard way).

Honestly the best skill I picked up was learning to search error messages verbatim. Last week I spent an hour trying to fix a weird import issue before I just pasted the whole red text into a search. Found a two year old forum post where someone had the exact same problem, down to the line number. Five minute fix after that.