Holy shit, I’ve repaired a couple of these. Somehow, both were personally owned by different professors, who each opted to have the repairs done in their respective buildings on the same university campus. These were only a couple months apart, maybe less.

I don’t even remember the parts I swapped, or if they were particularly easy or hard to work on inside. I seem to recall one of the Alienware gaming laptops with the removable GPUs I found surprisingly easy by comparison, but that doesn’t mean anything in an era where HP and Dell were both turning out SFF and not-so-SFF desktops that would have both the weirdest accomodations AND gotchas when it came to repairing them.

EDIT: Thinking it was the Optical Drive, in both of them.