On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:10 PM, John Francis <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 06:52:03PM -0500, Adam Maas wrote: >> On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 3:47 PM, AlunFoto <[email protected]> wrote: >> > 2010/2/6 Stan Halpin <[email protected]>: >> >> Among other Apple laptops I have performed surgery on, I have swapped out >> >> the hard drive on a white iMac G3. Talk about an integrated system not >> >> designed for user upgrade! But iFixIt is a godsend, and the procedure can >> >> be >> >> done even by a semi-klutz like me. The most nervous I have ever been doing >> >> such upgrades was in upgrading my Mac+ from 1 to 4mb of RAM. The upgrade >> >> required cutting two wires that served as jumpers on the circuit board, >> >> and I >> >> rechecked the directions 10-15 times before I made the cuts! >> >> >> >> stan >> > >> > Hardly a consolation, I guess, but I don't think other PC makers are >> > much better than Apple in this respect... We bought a series of about >> > 100 Fujitsu-Siemens desktop computers at work one year, which need >> > about 30 minutes of effort each, just to upgrade the RAM... :-( >> > >> > Jostein >> > >> >> Both HP and IBM/Lenovo are. Drop a panel, pull the drive/RAM, swap in >> the replacements. IBM's Thinkpads have had the same basic easy HDD >> swap design since the early 90's. >> >> Of course, both are major corporate suppliers. That seems to be an >> indicator for ease of servicability in my experience. >> >> -Adam > > In all fairness, too, the original complaint was about older desktop > computers, where you often had to remove half a dozen screws just to > take off the outer shell (although HP got that down to a couple of > hand-operable turnscrews fairly on in the process). > > My HP notebooks generally require maybe one screw to remove either > the access panel or the drive assembly, so replacing or upgrading > the RAM, hard drive(s) or optical drive is a simple end-user task. >
Missed the desktop bit, but IBM desktops have been easy-access since the early 80's, HP's weren't bad either (at worst it was 3 screws) and are super-easy now. I actually found the worst ones were the Apple G3/G4's, while they were easy to open, you needed a whole bunch of desk space to do so, rather than just popping the case off and working inside the machine. If you had the space, the Apple's were nice to work on though, especially the 8600/Beige G3 with the fold-out drive array. Great in the shop, not so good onsite. -- M. Adam Maas http://www.mawz.ca Explorations of the City Around Us. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
