I decided on cleaning my laptop fans today, which I’ve been procrastinating for about a year now because of this one screw. But I just can’t seem to open this with my screwdriver, since whatever I did back when I last opened it it’s nearly circular now. Is there a way to unscrew this?
So if you have a dremel and steady hands, a cut off wheel can make your own slot for a straight Phillips.
Just be careful to not knick anything else. This is more of a last resort thing, but I’ve never had it not work.
Learn from my mistakes, mask off your laptop’s ports and vents before you do this
Ooof. Not something I’d have thought of myself…
Benefit of your hindsight it’s obvious… lol. How bad were the sparks?
Surprisingly quiet, one little ‘pop’ was the last I heard from that motherboard. On-board power supplies were a reasonable step forward but man are they not fault tolerant
Keyboard too?
Yes
Flathead/standard not a straight Philips.
Flathead is a description of the head profile, like panhead. Slotted is the screwdriver type that is just a single slot.
It could be a regional thing. Where I’m from a screw with a single straight slot can be called a flathead whether the actual head of the screw is flat or domed.
It gets called that everywhere. Most people never need to know the actual specs for a screw, so language diverges from the classification system.
I usually keep the corrections to myself, but when somebody else is already correcting someone and they say the wrong thing too it becomes hard.
I came here to say that