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?
I prefer the rubber band trick first but usually when I get them down to this point I’ll use a smaller flathead from a jeweler set, see if you can find something that fits in between the two opposing tines of the Philips
Carefully dremel a slot in the screw head and use a flat head screwdriver.
Make sure you don’t get any dust into the electronics.
Rubber band?
Tried to no avail.
Use pliers and try not to break anything. It worked with my Lattitude, but the heatsink was still stuck on the CPU.
sometimes, you can weld something on and use that as a handle
Ask Frieren to do it for you
I believe I have become a skilled enough mage, so I’d prefer solving this on my own.
Use a piece of leather or some multiple sheets of masking tape
I don’t know if any is small enough, but there is a tool for this if nothing else works. A damaged screw extractor.
The square shaped ones work best, common brand is Easy Out
I once had a screw on a laptop that wouldn’t unscrew and eventually somewhat lost its shape. I had asked my uncle for help, who gave me the solution. I think it was slightly less bad than this, but it might help:
- Apply WD40 around the edges of the screw, such that it could enter the hole
- Apply it to the screw head
- Hold your screwdriver in the hole and gently tap it with a hammer a couple of times
- Slowly attempt to screw it out, whilst applying firm downward pressure on the screw
Note that the amounts of WD40 you have to apply are tiny. We’re talking drops of the stuff. It might be best to attempt to spray something else, and use the residue on the nozzle to apply it
Maybe try using a file to make flat sides on the outside of the head so you can use a wrench on it? (Not sure if that would be better or worse than the Dremel/slot idea… you would risk scratching the surface of the object it’s on.)
Is the groove for the screwdriver filled in? 🤨
Maybe just chisel out your own grooves to use whatever style driver you like. Should be doable with a dremel if you have a small enough cutting wheel.
If its big enough, try the rubber band trick to get some grip.
If its a tiny electronic screw, you’ll have to very carefully coax it out with either some needle nose pliers by gripping the outside, or by using a slightly larger screwdriver head and ensuring it doesn’t spin (very tricky, easy to strip screw further, using rubber band here might also help).
If the case can handle it, you can use the larger head and give it some decent amount of pressure to make sure it doesn’t spin when you turn. Again be careful, because pushing too hard could break the case.
You might have to inch it fractions of a turn at a time to make sure it doesn’t break, so it’ll take a while before it becomes loose enough to spin out by hand.
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.
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.
Learn from my mistakes, mask off your laptop’s ports and vents before you do this
Keyboard too?
Yes
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
I came here to say that
It looks like you probably don’t have enough edge for this, but a simple vise grip could work.
This was my first thought also. The defcon 2 solution. If that doesn’t work, the next step is to drill it out.
Depending how tight it is you could superglue something to it to turn it ?
I don’t really have superglue right now, and the screw looks like this far up, not sure it can be called tight or not.
(Screwdriver for comparison, couldn’t really find something better.)
You could also padding out the screwdriver tip or the screw hole. I’ve used sticky tape before, but again if its tight your pretty much out of luck…
That would have to be a pretty loose screw
Pretty much this - depending how much surface area and how good the glue is you might get it or you might snap that right off too. If it fails the next step is to carefully drill the screw out. A somewhat riskier operation but itll get it open
