I had a geektastic day at work. The production company I work for has some old laptops that are majorly broken and aren’t worth the amount of money it would take to get them working properly.
They’re so majorly broken, in fact, that they won’t even turn on so I could wipe the hard drives before we donated them to a charitable organization that will sell them for parts and keep the profits.
So instead, I got to take the laptops apart and remove the hard drives.
The major upside of this was that since the laptops were pretty much completely nonfunctional in the first place, they didn’t have to work at all when I finished reassembling them.
They just had to be reassembled so that they looked right.
God knows it’s much easier to take something apart and put it back together when the pressure is off to make it work properly when you’re done.
(Nerds keep reading, everyone else, skip to the stars)
The lappies were one of the very first versions of the G4 PowerBook and a somewhat more recent version of the iBook.
The PowerBook took about thirty seconds to disassemble and would have taken about ten more to pop the drive out if I’d been able to get my hands on a torx wrench that was the right size (which I hopefully will tomorrow).
The iBook, however, was insane. You have to take off the back case. Then you have to pop out the keyboard. Then you have to take out the wireless card and its tray.
Then you have to pry the motherfucker open like a crazy person (this portion of the procedure attracted the most attention of people walking past my desk).
Then you have to take off the shielding. Then you have to unscrew a bunch of stuff on the motherboard. Then you have to pry the top off.
Then, and only then, can you actually access the damn hard drive. God help me if I’d actually wanted to swap it out or continue using the computer in any way, shape, or form.
Also, I had three extra screws when I was done. I have NO idea where they go, because everything was held together perfectly. So I just scotch taped them to the back and will let the folks selling the parts sort it out.
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Suffice to say, the latter disassembly a) made me look like a total crazy person to my entire office and b) managed to satiate my need to take things apart for the next couple months.