Procrastinet

The Weekly WANT IT Blows it, Stalls for Time, Fixes It

filed under: The Weekly WANT IT

Back in June, there was a very rare occurrence - I fell in love with a purchasable object, found it at a reasonable price, talked myself into buying it, and then didn't buy it.

That's because I discovered that, rather than spend $1500+ on a new MacBook Pro, I could upgrade the overstuffed hard drive on my PowerBook myself. I jotted down a smug, self-congratulatory blog post, rushed out to buy the necessary parts, rolled up my sleeves and cracked open my computer.

And promptly f*cked it right up.

All was going well - I took off the plate over the RAM:

I got the keyboard unit lifted up:

And then got the keyboard unit detached:

And then unscrewed the first of the three screws that hold the bracket that holds the hard drive:

And then STRIPPED THE OTHER TWO SCREWS.

Oh yeah. What was once a #0 sized Phillips screwdriver slot (tiny) is now an almost smooth cone. Helpful.

It happened so gradually - I thought I was being careful. I'd try to turn it, it would lose grip, I'd look at the slot to make sure I wasn't stripping it, I'd try again... and then suddenly I had tried it like four dozen times and the screws were totally stripped.

So I did what any sensible person would do at this point - I set it aside and sulked about it for almost two months.

Then, two months later, I needed to build a sound cue for a show - and I needed Garage Band, on my computer, to do it. So, refreshed from my extended pout, I set back to work.

This time I brought a sharp utility knife, and scratched and scratched at the stripped remnants of the grooves until I had dug out a decent flat-head-friendly channel. Then I tried to turn it with a tiny flathead. It didn't work.

I scraped it some more and tried again. It didn't work. And again, and it didn't work.

At this point I may have started to lose my temper. I sort of yanked on the top of the bracket, where I had managed to get the first screw out, and twisted it and bent it and tried in general to either sort of break it off or at least bend it out of the way so I could jimmy the hard drive out.

NONE OF THIS IS A GOOD IDEA.

I got control of myself before I did any lasting harm, and took some deep calming breaths. Walked around the room a few times. Went and got a drink of water.

Then I sat back down, tried the flathead screwdriver again, and with a mild crack the top screw came right out.

And then the second did the same.

Apparently my snit fit, and specifically yanking on the recalcitrant bracket, actually got the screws free from the Apple-applied adhesive on their threads (don't tell me it's not there, it totally is because Apple HATES when you work on your own computer rather than paying them to do it), and all was well.

I swapped in the cloned hard drive, screwed it back in (using my well-grooved, newly flatheaded screws), put the rest back together, and turned it on. And sure enough, it was my computer again, just with 320GB of storage now. The thing works like a dream.

So kids, the moral of the story is: go ahead and lose your sh*t in the face of stubborn technology, but only enough to be useful.