Exclusively for those with laptops who like to screw....

[thewayne]

Completely SFW. Honestly! Would I lie to you, baby? :-)

And cut just to mess with people. Heh.

I picked up my laptop just now and a screw was left behind on the table! It's a plastic-bodied Asus ROG, so it flexes a bit, and clearly the screw had worked itself loose over the years. No problem, pick up my lovely iFixit toolkit ($25), pop in the Philips head, back in it goes.

Except there was another screw missing! It might be in my laptop bag, I'll do a deeper search tomorrow. Otherwise, it's lost and I'm not going to worry too much about it. I know the screw that I found was a corner screw and one was, indeed, missing, and that's where it went.

But here's the piece of advice: I went around and tightened every single screw, and pretty much every single screw moved at least a quarter turn! A couple moved almost a half turn! I wasn't bearing down and putting as much force as possible on them, this is just how much gave me a snug fit!

I briefly considered a dab of Loctite, but that's overkill. If I ever needed to do a major overhaul on my laptop, that's a possibility, but I just needed to snug up the screws a bit.

So there you have it. Do a little preventative maintenance, and you might avoid losing a screw like I apparently have. Do a little screwing and snug 'em up!

Comments

[armiphlage]

My old laptop shed so many screws, I bought a box of replacement ones online. Lasted another six months before the plastic housing cracked.

[thewayne]

Back around '08 I had an IBM Thinkpad, before they sold that division to Lenovo and then it later became Chinese.  It couldn't handle being picked up by the same side, being slid in and out of a backpack, and it developed internal problems and eventually died.  It really gave me an appreciation for metal-chassis Apple MacBook Pros.  Extremely well-engineered chassis.  They sometimes have other problems, but chassis flex isn't one of them.  Even their plastic chassis were very well-done.  Extremely solid.  I've never understood why laptop makers never made their cases to handle being handled roughly!  Isn't that the essence of what a laptop's life is about?

This is vaguely horrifying...

[dauntless_heart]

...on so many levels...

[armiphlage]

Injection-molded plastic is a lot cheaper than stamped steel or aluminum, so that's likely more important than meeting user needs.

Re: This is vaguely horrifying...

[thewayne]

It really depends on how hard you make your laptop work, physically.  A lot of people's laptops just sit in one place, maybe they move from a desk to the couch.  Mine moves from a table to my backpack to work back to home, always in and out of my backpack.  So it gets banged around a lot.  Lots of chassis flexing.  It gets literally twisted much more than the average user.  And that's going to cause screws to loosen and shorten its life.  This is something I'm going to have to watch for that probably a lot of people won't have to keep an eye on.

[thewayne]

Absolutely.  Apple laptops chassis are machined aluminum, which commands a premium, and you pay for it and the engineering that goes into it.

[silveradept]

Thankfully, you ended up doing the screwing, rather than being the one who got screwed when the screws bolted.