Curious How All The Laptop Professionals Operate 1

[DrB0b]

Hello Gentlemen and Ladies,
After reading a couple posts, one recent and others a bit older, I've come to wonder what "policies" or practices others who work on laptops do for certain parts of the disassembly process. Personally, I have been working with laptops for about 8 years now in a commercial setting and have fallen in my ways, but Im curious how others go about it.

First question I have is screw placement or holders, after you have removed the screws from the laptop being disassembled. After doing this for so long, you realize how each company designates their screws/sizes and can generally piece together their placement without any help. Give me a Dell or HP within the last 15 years and I could completely disassemble and reassemble without the aid of anything other than a screw pile and my memory. But when you come to a "new to you laptop" how do you store the screws to remember later? I used these: [link]http://www.walmart.com/ip/Diamond-Multi-Purpose-Mini-Cups-With-Lids-2-oz-50ct/17056809[/url] mostly because they were cheap and you could mark them up with a sharpie as of the placement. I believe I saw rclark talk about making a screw diagram with cardboard or paper and placing them accordingly.

I realize a video or taking pictures would be a good idea, but if you work on laptops in volumes, this would be a mound of data due to the different models constantly put out. Plus there is a wealth of media online when dealing with disassembly pics.

Also, as with older Apple notebooks, there could be a BUNCH of tiny plastic and metal pieces that have to be reassembled in a specific order otherwise it will not fit properly. How did you go about remembering that order? Documentation of each one would take a lot of time and since time is money in PC repair, unless you charge by the hour, that eats into profit. What if you are working on multiple laptop and have to keep one disassembled for days waiting on a part, will you be able to retrace your steps?

Any and all comments welcome as this is obviously an "Opinion" based thread. Just hoping other would share their work style to see where I could improve.
Thanks to all who comment.

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

 

[rclarke250]

Yep, On a system I've never seen before, to keep the screw placement correct, I'll use a piece of cardboard, and rough out the outside dimension, and just approximate and stick the screw through the cardboard so it looks like a flattened voodoo doll. flip it over, and you have a place to mount the screws from the inside. Also a sharpie to mark the holes on the board, and then I know which go through the system, and which just hold something in place. Lenovo T and W series are the worst.

 

[karlisi]

Cardboard or diagrams on paper. Some laptops have screw sizes marked near holes, wonder why not all. Had HP Compaq recently, six types of screws, three of them very similar size, almost impossible to guess where goes what. Before was cheap Acer, almost all screws same size, only few of them smaller and you can clearly see where they goes.

===
Karlis
ECDL; MCSA

 

[goombawaho]

I use a piece of paper, draw a circle for each "set" of screws for a particular assembly, place the screws in the circle and tape the screws to the paper. Then I write a description under them - order of assembly and what assembly.

No magic in this - however you can keep yourself organized. Little cups sitting on a piece of paper (to write on) would work too.

This is why I hate disassembling laptops. Peeling layers off like an onion with lots of screws and subassemblies and it often makes me cry too.

 

[xwb]

For the covers I use the Epson method (at least that is where I first saw it in the documentation). Undo the screw then put it back in its original hole and put a piece of cellotape over it. As for the insides: I've only gone as far as replacing memory or disks and that is relatively simple on the newer ones. On the older ones it took an age to work out how to separate the top and bottom halves.

On the old IBMs, you had to fiddle with the sliders on the side and suddenly the whole thing just came apart. Screwdriver not required! I was then left with a whole load of screws that I had undone that didn't really need undoing!