An Unnecessarily Difficult Laptop Repair

My laptop had had an issue for a while where the hinge was very loose, but in a weird way. Like I could adjust the screen to a certain angle and it would have say 20 degrees of freedom to just wobble around. This was very annoying so last night I finally decided to fix it. I expected this to be an easy routine fix and didn’t take a lot of pictures, and after the difficulty I had I don’t want to open my laptop again for a little while so I apologize for the lack of pics. Here’s how it went.

Getting the bottom cover off was as easy as ever. Just undo the screws, pry open the clips, lift off, and badabing badaboom the laptop is open, baby. After that is where it gets harder. I knew going in that I needed to get access to the screws that hold the hinges to the laptop frame. The problem is that those are covered by the laptop’s hinge cover. Getting there is something I’ve never done before and needed a manual for. Unfortunately, I have a pretty niche laptop that has been discontinued (HP Dev One) and so service manuals for it aren’t readily available. The closest I could find was this manual for a HP EliteBook 845 G8 Notebook. That matches up pretty well, but not perfectly and for this specific repair the differences started showing up real quick.

Here’s the first portion of the steps to remove the laptop’s display assembly:

This is all well and good and makes sense. The problem is that my laptop doesn’t have the same connections. My laptop has the cables for the Wi-Fi antenna, a cable for the camera, and one for the display itself. The Wi-Fi antenna is trivial to disconnect, but the other two either weren’t removable or used a locking mechanism that I had never encountered before. So I opted to leave them connected and just deal with the fact that the two halves would be tethered together. This meant that not only was my ability to move the display assembly limited, but I also had to be careful lest I damage the cables I couldn’t disconnect.

So that was inconvenient, but I thought I was out of the woods in terms of differences between my laptop and the EliteBook as the hinge cover looked very similar. So all I needed to do was remove the hinge cover, tighten the screws underneath, and I would be done. To remove the hinge cover I have to remove the screen bezel- shit. Ok, so here’s the problem. On the EliteBook, the screen bezel is separate from the actual display. It’s just a piece of plastic with clips that you can pry right off. My laptop screen is built more akin to a MacBook, where the bezel is “part” of the screen underneath the same piece of glass. There’s no way to pry it off to get to the screw I need to release the hinge cover (and believe me, I tried as much as I dared to).

This is where I had to get creative. I don’t really care about the appearance of my laptop. This is good news because I needed to cause some cosmetic damage to access the hinge screws. Let me explain: the hinge cover is made out of plastic. This means that it can be… negotiated out of the way. I ended up prying up the clips holding it in place (which were decidedly not built for this and broke in the process) and bending the edges of it enough to get access to the screws. I then tightened the screws, bent the hinge cover back into place as best I could (it wouldn’t stay exactly in place because of the broken clips), reattached the display assembly, and closed up my laptop. The good news is that I didn’t break anything functional and my screen no longer wobbles. The bad news is that the hinge cover now looks like this:

I like to think my laptop is pretty easy to work on, and it still is for anything below the screen. But this issue was so baffling to me. Why should I have to get under the screen in order to remove the hinge cover? Was there really no better way to design that? Anyway it works now, it just looks a little worse. So I’m happy if mildly annoyed. Thanks for reading.

Update: I managed to bend the hinge cover back into place better, which significantly reduces the visible cosmetic damage.