What is the hardest laptop to open

Out of the few I've taken apart, Dell's have by far been the most annoying and time consuming. HP's might have been if it wasn't for the fact I generally have all types of screw heads (bizarre and weird) knocking around!
 
Hi guys just thought I would start a post on whats the hardest laptop to totally remove every part and have it separate on a table :) enjoy


The hardest one for me is the dell studio 1558

My dad had a studio 1535, not sure how similar it is but after the first 30 times you start seeing a pattern of how most laptops go together.

I'd say 90's laptops are difficult because everyone was still experimenting with what the easiest way to build them. Armada 7800 was pretty tough to pull apart.

Inspiron 8000 was the easiest.
 
The new apple macbooks. They decided to forgo screws and start gluing things in place. You have to send it in for service to get the battery changed. The LCD is fused to the bezel, so the whole assembly has to be changed. There's no way to upgrade RAM without replacing the entire motherboard.

I'm afraid this is going to go like every other feature apple decides to omit, and end up being adopted by other manufacturers after the outrage dies down and having such a feature missing is no longer considered so abnormal. I still partially blame apple for the fact that I can't replace the battery in my phone without carrying around two screwdrivers and a spudger to get the cover off. Sure it's not apple's fault directly, but they're the ones who made it acceptable for manufacturers to omit such a basic feature.


The worst one I've personally worked on is the old PPC-era iBooks. Not so much because it's super hard to get apart, but good luck doing it without instructions and drawing a bunch of diagrams along the way. It's made extra bad because the things were absolutely terrible and broke constantly. I probably had to service that thing at least ten times before I just gave up and let it remain dead.


I also figure that I should mention the best laptop I've had to work on. This goes to the ASUS G75. You remove one screw, pull a cover off, and you have access to both HDD bays, two open memory slots, and the CPU fan (so you can easily clear dust.) The fan for the GPU is under another cover, which can also be accessed by removing a single screw. The battery also pulls out with a single latch, as expected. For the manufacturer to go out of their way to make their stuff easy to service is really a rare thing nowadays, so I think it should be applauded.


Here's an image to show what I mean.

G75-upgrade.jpg
 
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The new apple macbooks. They decided to forgo screws and start gluing things in place. You have to send it in for service to get the battery changed. The LCD is fused to the bezel, so the whole assembly has to be changed. There's no way to upgrade RAM without replacing the entire motherboard.

I'm afraid this is going to go like every other feature apple decides to omit, and end up being adopted by other manufacturers after the outrage dies down and having such a feature missing is no longer considered so abnormal. I still partially blame apple for the fact that I can't replace the battery in my phone without carrying around two screwdrivers and a spudger to get the cover off. Sure it's not apple's fault directly, but they're the ones who made it acceptable for manufacturers to omit such a basic feature.


The worst one I've personally worked on is the old PPC-era iBooks. Not so much because it's super hard to get apart, but good luck doing it without instructions and drawing a bunch of diagrams along the way. It's made extra bad because the things were absolutely terrible and broke constantly. I probably had to service that thing at least ten times before I just gave up and let it remain dead.


I also figure that I should mention the best laptop I've had to work on. This goes to the ASUS G75. You remove one screw, pull a cover off, and you have access to both HDD bays, two open memory slots, and the CPU fan (so you can easily clear dust.) The fan for the GPU is under another cover, which can also be accessed by removing a single screw. The battery also pulls out with a single latch, as expected. For the manufacturer to go out of their way to make their stuff easy to service is really a rare thing nowadays, so I think it should be applauded.


Here's an image to show what I mean.

G75-upgrade.jpg

Man, that G75 looks like a dream. Kudos to Asus but shouldn't all manufactures do that?

And yes on your macbooks note, dissasembling a icebook g3 is a major pain in the but because how different the design is. You have to bend the key board almost to breaking it, to get the wifi card out, so you can get to a screw under it that lets you take the keyboard all the way off, plus everything fits too snug in there and it took me 11 tries to get it back together, and i still misplaced a shroud for the fan, oh well, it was blocking some airflow...
 
Man, that G75 looks like a dream. Kudos to Asus but shouldn't all manufactures do that?

They should, but they don't. ASUS is pretty much alone in that regard, at least in my experience. Even other gaming laptops like MSI or alienware *shudders* don't put this much attention into it. The little doors thrown all over the place usually seem like an afterthought more than anything. I've never seen another that had everything just laid out like that.


And yes on your macbooks note, dissasembling a icebook g3 is a major pain in the but because how different the design is. You have to bend the key board almost to breaking it, to get the wifi card out, so you can get to a screw under it that lets you take the keyboard all the way off, plus everything fits too snug in there and it took me 11 tries to get it back together, and i still misplaced a shroud for the fan, oh well, it was blocking some airflow...

There's two tabs between esc and f1 and between f11 and f12 that release the keyboard. No need to bend it. It was really annoying removing screws with the keyboard dangling around by a ribbon cable though. The whole thing was possible to take apart without breaking anything, but they sure didn't make it easy. Mine had little dents all over the seams because the plastic was too soft to be pried apart without it bending a little bit every time.
 
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