[TIP] Worst Makes and Models of laptops to work on.

Kitten Kong

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Following a recent thread of mine, re a HP Pavilion 14, to gain access to the hard drive, you need to strip the laptop to pieces.

@Porthos came up with a good idea I think.

Basically what are the worst makes and models of laptops to work on as a technician.

Please give your reasons why too. If possible, include photographs to backup your reasonings.

Anyhow, I will start this off, with 2 laptops, I'm currently working on.
 
Dell Inspiron N5010

This laptop has a strange engineering design. To change the Hard Disk drive you must fully disassemble it. There is not an HDD cover like on other laptops. (Pictures located on https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Dell+Inspiron+n5110+-+HDD+Replacement+-+Upgrade/28194
Remove the battery.
The keyboard is held by 4x locking clips.
Remove keyboard
Now you have 12x M 2.5x5.0 screws.
Unscrew 4x M 2.5x5.0 screws and disconnect the 3x flex cables:
Remove the upper case
Disconnect:The LCD display cable
5x M 2,5x5.0 screws hold the motherboard to the down bezel
Remove motherboard from right side, near to the DVD drive connector.
Finally you can find the hard disk drive on the back side of the motherboard.
Remove the last two screws securing the hard drive.
Memory is also located underside of the motherboard.
 
It's been a while since I've encountered them (thankfully), but the "strange engineering" from your post was unfortunately also used by Acer on some of their models a while back. e.g: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Acer+Aspire+One+ZG5+Hard+Drive+Replacement/3784

I seem to remember working on an Acer 15" around that time as well, with the same design choices (but more screws), but can't remember the model name.

Just put a f***ing removable panel on the bottom chassis, for Christs sake!
 
glennd said:
That seems to be a thing with low end Acers now or is it Asus, probably both...
Click to expand...
+1 on that.

Recently had one that had a mobo two thirds of the normal size, complete base dissassembly to get to hard drive. Had failed after 15 months. Build and component quality visually below par.
 
Most consumer level electronics are going this route now. (Some have been doing it for years) Most companies want to force the public to use their support services or just straight up make you purchase a new piece of equipment. Enterprise level equipment is designed to be serviceable by IT staff.
 
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Diggs said:
Any Apple hardware........
Click to expand...
I don't mind macbooks, once you do a few you feel like you've done them all. I hate PC laptops more because they don't have any common practices, which means every new model means you're working with something different.

Asus ROG and MSI gaming laptops IMO are the absolute worst. Evey component gets a different length screw, none labeled, there's like 30+ parts for the chassis (the palmrest themselves are often 3 different pieces for example). I charge $150-$199 labor to do any hardware work on them. I hate them so damn much.
 
Recently had a HP 255 G2 that required the removal of 33 screws and the laptop stripping down to get the hard drive out. Drive had failed, tell simply by the noise it was making when the machine was powered up.

https://www.northwestpcdoctors.co.uk/hp-255-g2-hard-drive-replacement/

I quite enjoy the challenge of getting into a new laptop design and working out how to get them open. The worst I have ever tried to work on is a Dell XPS Gaming Laptop, that thing was so complicated I had to take photos at each step otherwise I would not have gotten the thing back together again.
 
I just had to do 2 SSD swaps on 2 ACER laptops both bought at same time 2 years ago
first had a door 3-minute job other I had to strip down 90 mins on top of the cloning.

sorry don't remember models I had to do it on site with Youtube
I got them cloning together.
Tried the DVD that came with Samsung SSD you do it in Windows was taking forever
so I used Acronis
 
Last edited:
What model did you have to strip down completely @johnrobert ?

That's what this thread is all about.

Sharing the models which are a pita to work on. So that other techs will know to either charge a little more, or add time to their plan.
 
For me the worst make would be the Toshiba Portege Z30t. It heats up frequently and the cursor starts to move by itself after a few uses.
 
Not hard to work on but with an almost 100% failure rate, the older HP DV9 laptops had heating issues that nuked the video card almost every time. As soon as we saw either an eMachine (usually a mobo failure) or a DV9 (mobo/video failure) we almost always knew what the problem was without even talking to the client.
 
Nige said:
Dell Inspiron N5010

This laptop has a strange engineering design. To change the Hard Disk drive you must fully disassemble it. There is not an HDD cover like on other laptops. (Pictures located on https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Dell+Inspiron+n5110+-+HDD+Replacement+-+Upgrade/28194
Remove the battery.
The keyboard is held by 4x locking clips.
Remove keyboard
Now you have 12x M 2.5x5.0 screws.
Unscrew 4x M 2.5x5.0 screws and disconnect the 3x flex cables:
Remove the upper case
Disconnect:The LCD display cable
5x M 2,5x5.0 screws hold the motherboard to the down bezel
Remove motherboard from right side, near to the DVD drive connector.
Finally you can find the hard disk drive on the back side of the motherboard.
Remove the last two screws securing the hard drive.
Memory is also located underside of the motherboard.
Click to expand...

Came here to say this exact same model. The 1st time I swapped a hard drive in this unit, I found a YouTube video documenting the process. When a YouTube video to swap a hard drive is 28 minutes long, you're in for a rough time...
 
Those N5110's are a pain indeed. I find most laptops have some parts that are easy to remove and other parts that take forever. Older Lenovo laptops the base cover was a long task to remove like on the older X201, X220 tablets. On the X240 laptops the base cover is only like 8 screws and it pops off with some prying. So that being said over the past few years I would have to recommend the Dell XPS 13 (L321x, L322x) models are a pain for getting the keyboard changed. 10 screws to get the base cover off, motherboard, battery, wireless card have around 15 screws. Then the keyboard itself has 23 screws in it I believe.
Lenovo Yoga Tablet, not sure the exact model as two companies had identical models and one just worked way better. Anyway, changing the LCD panel was easy up until replacing it. The video from Lenovo did not even help. You had to place it into the backcover 5mm below the top and slide it up to lock it in. After lining it up and pushing up to lock it in resulted in cracking the small plastic tabs. This is much harder to explain in text than showing so I apologize for that. Long story short I probably only succeeded in properly replacing maybe 5 out 30 or so. And to complicate it worse, the other company using the tablet, using the same exact FRU# for the Panel and back cover had absolutely no issues with reseating the panel into the back cover. Same removal procedure, same re-installation and different results.

I've worked on plenty others but these were the most common ones I worked with over the last year.
 
Nige said:
Dell Inspiron N5010

This laptop has a strange engineering design. To change the Hard Disk drive you must fully disassemble it. There is not an HDD cover like on other laptops. (Pictures located on https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Dell+Inspiron+n5110+-+HDD+Replacement+-+Upgrade/28194
Remove the battery.
The keyboard is held by 4x locking clips.
Remove keyboard
Now you have 12x M 2.5x5.0 screws.
Unscrew 4x M 2.5x5.0 screws and disconnect the 3x flex cables:
Remove the upper case
Disconnect:The LCD display cable
5x M 2,5x5.0 screws hold the motherboard to the down bezel
Remove motherboard from right side, near to the DVD drive connector.
Finally you can find the hard disk drive on the back side of the motherboard.
Remove the last two screws securing the hard drive.
Memory is also located underside of the motherboard.
Click to expand...

Yes I got burnt with this laptop. Quoted a client for what I thought was a straightforward job and ended up taking triple the time! Bad design Dell, what were you thinking Dell. Even from a warranty perspective, Dell internal staff time etc
 
Laptops are my specialty, so I frequently service these hard to open ones. Typical Dell, Acer, HP units that require teardown for HDD access, I've gotten myself down to about 5-10 minutes. But this only because it's all I do. Reassembly does take a bit longer as I usually replace thermal compound and ultrasonic the heatsinks before putting it all back in.

If your typical clients have older hardware that doesn't require teardown, yes it can be annoying. Practice is good though.

As a side note, there are a few models of Acer's that now have the access bay back which is nice. The ones I saw it on was a dual core AMD A9 with 8GB RAM/1TB HDD 15".
 
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