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| Written by Jono Cono It’s amazing what some people do when it comes to a lot of things but for me on a daily basis this involves technology. A customer recently brought in an Acer 14 inch laptop. It would power on, there would be a grinding spinning noise and nothing would appear on the screen. After attempting to power it on myself I also noticed that it would power cycle itself with nothing coming up on the display.
After removing one of the two memory sticks in the system it would now POST and Boot normally with video display. Upon trying to run some other tests it became apparent that the optical drive was not working. Pushing the button would not release the tray. Using the emergency release hole to pop the tray open and completely removing the optical drive it became visible why there was a grinding noise when the system was powered on and why the tray would not pop open normally. The aluminum top of the optical drive was pushed in. I took the optical drive apart and reshaped the aluminum back to how it should be.
Curious as to how the optical drive could have ended up like that I did a closer visual inspection of the laptop. I could see when looking on an angle that the keyboard appeared caved in. I went a step further and removed the keyboard bezel and keyboard. Once I did that I knew what happened. Someone using the laptop had gotten angry or otherwise vindictive and smashed their right fist on laptop. This caused the keyboard to cave in and the chassis and optical drive to bend in as well.
Lucky for this person after a bit of work the laptop is back in working order, but it’s going to cost them.
