snap fit bullshit

[coppercone2]

Seriously I hate this shit. I just had to fucking chisel into a god damn laptop with a fucking hammer to undo a snap fit. Now its in the trash. God damn. I refuse to even work on that dog shit.

hahaha hinge tool my balls. I literately had to take a hammer to the fucker to wedge something in there. I saw a youtube video where the guy does it with a god damn credit card on the same model. Nice manufacturing tolerances HP. Fuck your printers too. I just broke 400$. And I am happier for it. Nice thermal design too with the over heating. Would it kill people to use a few more screws and a gasket? Holy shit. By the time I opened it my stress level was so high I was just like fuck it, rip the ram and hard drive out and toss the fucker.

p.s. probably broke because of shit thermal design. They are allergic to fucking metal I swear. Joke of a heat sink inside mounted like a joke. They got a tiny die-cast heat sink with a heat pipe on the CPU. What the fuck. I think it used to cost like 800$ too. It looks like pot metal. Gee I wonder if their fucking manufacturing budget went on pot. Looks like they used about a mile high pile of thermal compound between the CPU and the heat sink. When I saw it I was just like yea this is trash and the engineers musta been fucking completely baked.

[sleemanj]

A poor workman blames his tools.

[coppercone2]

yea that heat sink just fucking speaks 'quality design' to me LOL

i bet you like snap rings dont you?

[Monkeh]

i bet you like snap rings dont you?

I bet you have a practical, equal-cost alternative for securing shafts all lined up, but you're the only one who sees it.

[coppercone2]

Regarding the heat sink, well, if it works for 99% of the people, then the rest 1% should think what they did wrong, not what HP did wrong.

A chunk of copper can well underperform compared with a properly designed tiny heat pipe.

Welcome to 2018, where put good materials in, get good out no longer applies. Nowadays, it is put good design in, get good out.

its trash bro, lenovo and dell laptops don't have this kind of shit in them and they actually disassemble properly. Cheaper too.

zero capacity thermal design is trash too, if you clog a vent for 2 seconds it gets fucked up. Also its not one of those designs thats super full inside, they decided to shave pennies on it.

[wraper]

A poor workman blames his tools.

There is also Russian variant: "A bad dancer blames his testicles".

[coppercone2]

now that I am thinking about shit design, the heat exchanger on this thing is impossible to clean. You need to do a full disassembly to access the fins because they are hidden behind some plastic grate thats part of the bottom plate. If they had a ounce of thought that part would be accessible by a separate smaller panel held on by a few screws. If I were to actually fix this thing, I would have probably cut the damn plastic grate off on a band saw and modded it so you can take it off without disassembling the entire back panel with 12 snap hinges and like 15 screws.

Why the hell would you expect someone to take apart like 12 or more snap hinges to do regular cleaning of the heat exchanger? If you wanted to make it real good you would put a screw covered port on the back panel so you can stick a compressed air tube in there and blow out the heat exchanger. As usual its clogged with a 3mm layer of dust. But you get a little cake thing thats impossible to blow out. I have done this before. I ended up having to make special hook tools out of paper clips and shit to try to get the dust cake out of the area between the stupid laptop plastic protector and the heat exchanger. And you need alot more pressure and flow then a compressed air can.

People don't adapt to thermal requirements. Same as when I see LED lights used in old holders, I got the new ones that have convection air flow that works with the damn cooling fins on the bulbs.

Actually I think the thing was built with negative pressure, so it makes a dust film behind the heat exchanger that you can't blow out through the fan. It's just ridiclous.

I don't care anymore. Its dead and I am done with it. 

Videocards have this problem too but at least you can get a chassis with a dust filter on it.

[wraper]

now that I am thinking about shit design, the heat exchanger on this thing is impossible to clean.

I'll tell you a simple trick. Drive to a fuel filling station, take compressed air gun (at least we have those here), blow air into the grill, done. There might be some speckles of dust trapped inside the case left but they don't affect anything.

[james_s]

I'm not generally bothered by cursing, but jeez, when you use those words as much as the OP it kinda wears them out, and doesn't exactly present an image of sophistication and intelligence.

[Brumby]

I've cleaned out the radiator side of a laptop's heat exchanger.  Did it by doing a partial disassembly ... carefully.  I was then able to remove the fluff build-up in a single piece.  It had the consistency of carpet underlay, so I'm not sure how effective compressed air would have been.

After that, the frequent shutdowns stopped altogether.

[vk6zgo]

OK , you are upset with "snap fit" on a laptop!
Try it on a car!

My daughter's Hyundai has the bumper/"stone tray" held on with the same sort of thing.
Just like all the small junk like battery covers on TV remotes, etc, it relies upon plastic being resilient & springing back to its original position.

This part of the car body vibrates loose, & the first few times can be tapped back, but after that, it won't go back  properly.
Maybe they wanted it to be able to fall off in the case of an accident, but the same could have been achieved by using plastic shatterable bolts or rivets.

Anyhow, Hyundai won't fix it under warranty--- they say "You must have ran up on the curb!"

Miserable sods!

[coppercone2]

oh yea cars if its not under the hood I don't wanna deal with it. Usually its completely demented.

[wraper]

It had the consistency of carpet underlay, so I'm not sure how effective compressed air would have been.

It would just separate into smallish pieces. Disassembly is really necessary only if you are unlucky and one of those pieces get stuck in the fan preventing it's normal operation.

[coppercone2]

not from my experience. Maybe if you get some kinda thin tubing like the one used for filling balls to put between the fins with like 100PSI.

[CatalinaWOW]

Screws take space and cost assembly time and add to BOM cost.  All things that go opposite to what the majority of the consumer market wants right now.  And screws aren't magic either.  How many times have you found a plastic displacement screw has reamed out all of the material it was supposed to grab, or broken off the post it attached to.  The answer is a larger post and a metal insert.  Which takes you back to comment one in spades.

From another direction, tabs aren't the fundamental issue.  It is blind tabs, which are cosmetically desirable, allow more flexible placement and provide a little better moisture barrier.  But apparently the marketplace values the looks and the last little bit of compactness more than maintainability.

This is just another one of those demonstrations that it is harder than hell to get all three of better, faster and cheaper.  Generally impossible.

[coppercone2]

at least with a screw if you strip it you can fill it with JB weld and retap it if you have a blind tap. It can cosmetically still look functional if you are careful drilling it out.

I don't even know how to approach the bastard I had properly. Maybe if you had a bunch of steel shim stock you can like pry it open at two points really carefully by sliding in lubricated shimstock to widen two gaps, there was like NO way to use wedges etc. That's too crazy for me. It's not using snap fit, its actually using harpoons.

[station240]

So how many of these do you need to buy a replacement laptop then ?

[CJay]

A poor workman blames his tools.

Mhmm, my thoughts too.

Nothing a Compaq Wedge or an iSesame wouldn't deal with (and I've repaired *hundreds* of laptops in my time)

[Richard Crowley]

Isn't this why we have literally dozens of different kinds of spudgers?

[rdl]

I was trying to repair an HP ethernet switch where the reset switch had broken. It was a tactile button that was pushed in the sideways direction. The idiot designer had used an smd device. It lasted for about 10 presses I estimate before breaking loose. I went to open the case, got it separated pretty much all around except at the front and it refused to come loose. After about an hour, I gave in and used physical force to tear it apart. The upper and lower parts of the case had been connected with two tiny screws through the front panel.

Those two screws were hidden behind the glued on front panel plastic overlay. 
Wow.

[coppercone2]

Normally that works. In this case no. I could not get it to seperate at all. I dont think i coulda slided a feeler gauge into it. I had to bust it open like a locked door.

I think the plastic got stiffer over time. I thought it was clamshell welded.

[wraper]

I was trying to repair an HP ethernet switch where the reset switch had broken. It was a tactile button that was pushed in the sideways direction. The idiot designer had used an smd device. It lasted for about 10 presses I estimate before breaking loose. I went to open the case, got it separated pretty much all around except at the front and it refused to come loose. After about an hour, I gave in and used physical force to tear it apart. The upper and lower parts of the case had been connected with two tiny screws through the front panel.

I'm avoiding using SMD side switches, but how hard you need to press a reset button which you normally should not touch to begin with?

[rdl]

I agree, shouldn't need to press it often, but it didn't seem to be working so I used it more than they expected I guess. The thing is, since you normally wouldn't need it often, they could have made it bottom access instead of the front panel. Then when pressing it the force would be toward the pcb instead of across. The pads for the reset and clear buttons were already on the bottom of the pcb, all they had to do was relocate the holes and change the switch type.

[wraper]

but it didn't seem to be working so I used it more than they expected I guess.

I guess it's a type of button you need to hold for a few seconds. And many people apply excessive force thinking it's not working. I sometimes repair ovens which have conductive rubber switches with plastic caps. You need to hold power button for 2 seconds to switch it on (guess measure against accidental switch on). But most people I've seen instead press it as hard as they can. As result PCB bends and cracks in soldering appear and cause completely unrelated faults.

[Bassman59]

Seriously I hate this shit. I just had to fucking chisel into a god damn laptop with a fucking hammer to undo a snap fit. Now its in the trash. God damn. I refuse to even work on that dog shit.

Ages ago I got a DigiDesign (now Avid) MBox 2 for cheap, and being the curious sort I tried to take it apart.

Keyword: tried.

It was clearly designed to not be reverse-engineered. Lots of screws and also lots of snap-fit shit, and a lot of folded metal for EMI mitigation.

The worst thing was that DD/Avid loves to deprecate old hardware, so its useful life was very short.