Technicians? Bah! Legalized thievery in my opinion. Ok, maybe not. But close. My sister’s iBook had an “accident” in which the CD tray was forcibly removed from the computer. I took it to CompUSA and they sent it to Apple thanks to AppleCare. Two weeks later I get a call from CompUSA, everything seems to be in order. I have to pay CompUSA for the work they did (which should have been nothing) which came to about $30, and I brought it out to the car and opened it up. There was a little piece of paper with something along the lines of “Upon inspection, we’ve determined that the hard drive is in good condition and does not need to be replaced.” Hmm. Still no CD tray. I took it back in and tried to figure out what had happened. Apparently, I told them that the hard drive was defective. They had to repeat it three times before I understood that they were accusing me of giving them the wrong information. Even my grandma could tell what was wrong with the thing. Another three weeks later (it sat at CompUSA for over a week) I got it back, good as new, thankfully.
A year later my sister wants a DVD burner. No problem. I head over to MCEtech.com, buy it, and it took me about an hour to finish and test. One hour. Imagine that, from over a month to one hour plus shipping time.
As for future upgrades, on the pbfixit website (the site linked to from about.com in the article) you can print up a screw guide which has a place for each screw and a description of where it came from. Using the combination of screw guide and fix-it guide it is fairly easy to keep track of all the screws. The only problem is having to worry about the screws rolling away, but some double sided photo tape will do the trick quite nicely (regular double sided tape is a little too strong in my opinion).
I recently upgraded the drive in my 12” PowerBook which is supposedly not recommended even for hardened do-it-yourselfers. I also took three Titanium PowerBooks and combined them into one working one for my girlfriend, but that was just me having fun with old broken down laptops. It help to have a little experience and to have a good feel for when things just aren’t right, and more importantly, when things are right. The startup tone when I reassembled the Titaniums was one of the sweetest things I have ever heard.
