Dell 1, Apple 0

Idiotic moment of the day - realising the exhaust on the motorbike was loose while I was going on along and pulling over to have a look, and grabbing it. Lucky I had gloves on or I'd be quite burnt I think as it hurt enough as it was.

Replacing the keyboard unit on the MacBook was the most traumatic laptop repair I have yet done. Simply removing the top case involved removing at least twenty screws of varying sizes, and then spudgering the edges away from the case. Having finally done this, I was greeted with a motherboard coated in gunk and dog hairs, which I tried to clean up as much as possible. I'm rather bothered now about my plans to replace the screen.

I can strip the Dell Latitude D-series laptops we use in work to bare parts in about five minutes, and at the end will have about twenty screws in total, of two sizes. The same screws are used to hold the case together, the motherboard in, and the display in place. The only screws of a different size are the slightly smaller ones that hold in the keyboard. The Precision M65 and Latitude D630 I use at home are very similar and I've them each apart at least twice with no problems at all.

On the plus side I did get the MacBook back together fine and it looks hugely better with the new clean palmrest even though it does have a little piece missing. I took the opportunity to swipe a 2gb DIMM from the M65 for it. It didn't like mismatched DIMMs though, with a 2gb and a 512mb in, it failed to power up. With the single 2gb DIMM it worked fine. Odd. Snow Leopard seems to appreciate the extra RAM though.