Customer brought their PC to get cleaned up, it was a decent machine when purchased and it still is as it's a P4 3.0 ghz with a gig of ram, windows XP. More than sufficient for web browsing. Well, the harddrive went bad on this machine. So the computer savvy guy I am, decided, this shouldn't be hard...........
http://reviews.cnet....7-30565073.html <---- Link to the computer in question, just for picture purposes, I didnt have my phone on me to take pictures of the actual unit but my story of what happened is more than enough.
Figured, hey, it will be in a slide out panel in the back just like a laptop or any other small form factor computer. It's one of the things that can and will go wrong in a PC most of the time. So I take every panel off on the back........ No dice.....
After poking and tinkering, I realized the entire base/support for the monitor/PC needs to be removed to get to the inner workings. Shouldnt be hard at all, until they used different sized screws, different screw heads, torx, flat, phillips, hell there was an allen wrench screw in there too! Had to get out he whole shibang to take this pile of sh*t out.
After about 3 hours, I got to the harddrive, yet it was encased in metal, so I had to take the entire LCD out, the motherboard out, pretty much disassembled the whole thing. Had parts everywhere. Grabbed a known working harddrive(more on this later) and slapped it in. Alright, we are in good shape! Put it back together, took about an hour since I knew how it went together.
Got everything set up, ready to go. Pressed the power button, and...... YES! It still works! Plopped in the Gateway recovery DVD and started the recovery process............. What's that sound? Seems to be a clicking noise........... Emitting from the....... harddrive.......... Yes, I grabbed a dead harddrive off a known working pile of drives that are all factory sealed never been opened.
Who the f*ck designs this sh*t? If it's a user replaceable part why enclose it in about a hundred different little screws, levers, tabs, and other sh*t to get at a simple part as a harddrive? If it was the processor then yes I would expect it to be difficult as that isnt a user serviceable part.
So needless to say, if any of you want a free Gateway 610 PC, come on over to Whitehall, MI, it's sitting in a snowbank behind the shop
/end rant
