I hate hp with a fiery passion when it comes to tearing their computers apart to repair them. Yet again I'm cleaning blood from the inside of yet another hp thats broken. The design engineers at that company must be some of the most sadistic assholes ever spawned. Sharp edges aside, all their little hidden screws and the ever elusive 'locking screw' thats ment to hold the HDD/media core in place make me want to scream.

Anyone else have a personal blacklist of computers they would like to charge an extra 40% fee for working on?

When I was an I.T tech I didn't mind HP. I found them easy to disassemble/reassemble, however, I didn't come across a great deal... No PC's really caused me any grief.

But with notebooks, the brand I absolutely HATE is acer. Some genius who designs acers notebooks must have decided to make everybodies life harder and make every single screw a different size, same goes with Toshiba in some models. BUT with acer, if you wanted to get to something simple, most of the time you had to access it by taking the keyboard off, and additionally more times then not, remove the screen as well.

I can not begin to tell you how much I hate acer.

I've had the fortune not to experience any Acer laptops yet, but HP laptops are like that, to get to anything you need to remove the keyboard and the screen, then you can remove the topcase to get to the mobo. Thankfully the screws aren't all different.

Dell and HP's computers have always been nothing but clouds for me. Now though, Toshiba... Well, let's just say that the restraining order is there for a reason. A bloody evil reason that makes me want to rip someone's soul out. :/

There's a local computer store around where I live called Microcenter. They have their own line of computers PowerSpec that they sell there. When I repaired my first PS I wanted to shoot someone. All (and I mean all) of the hardware inside is hot glued together. Every PCI card was glued into its slot, the CPU was glued into its socket, and every cord/wire was glued into it's location. That was almost a decade ago, so hopefully they've cleaned up their act by now :P

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[zok@zoklet ~]$ find jesus
find: jesus: No such file or directory
[zok@zoklet ~]$ whereis Zok
Zok: /derzok/at/gmail/dot/com

Holy shit, that's fuckin' funny... You should go down to the shop, kick open the back door, and take that glue gun and shove it up their asses.

I would say Blue Hippo stuff. Not only are their cases rivetted shut, but the users make the problems so damned hard to fix.

I have an HP notebook and I have taken it apart completely about 3 times when I was painting and installing a second memory chip. Everything was easy to take apart. Contrast this to a Dell laptop I worked on recently that had its memory soldered onto the motherboard which went bad and bricked it. Took me several hours to get just the mobo out of the case with everything else off.

I need to take my laptop apart again and repaint it now that I have some experience with spray cans.

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In the correct dosage, violence solves anything.

These new UMPC's that are coming out are going to be a fucking bitch.

I have a Dell Dimension 8200, its really easy to take apart and toy with, but separating the Mobo from the case is a little fiddly.

Whoever said HP machines was right on, they are a nightmare, not so much the new ones, but 3-5 years old you're better off taking a hammer to it and smashing the hardware out, then buying a new case and PSU when its fixed. eMachines have that awful "locking nut" thing too. The harddrives are contained in a metal box which is attached to the case interior, there isn't enough room to simply slide out the HDD. You have to disconnect its box from the case, which is awkward as fuck, then take the harddrive out. Very impractical design.

I have come across a few old gateways that require nothing less then a carbide drill to remove the hard drive.