Yet I’m having a hard time finding this in local hardware store (Home Depot doesn’t carry anything smaller than M4) and even electronics store.
I’d like to avoid ordering from Amazon out of principle, but if that’s unavoidable I could make a compromise. It does seem incredibly silly to order just a single screw by mail order, as the envelope will likely be heavier than the contents…
Where can we find that stuff? Ideally in a local (Montreal, Canada) store?
To find that size screw locally, check with local computer repair shops. Those are pretty standard sizes and when I worked in one we always had bags of them laying around. If you only need one screw they probably wouldn’t even charge you.
You might have some luck with a smaller specialized hardware store but you’d almost certainly have to special/mail order them as there’s likely very little demand that doesn’t justify keeping them in stock.
Electronics shops are going to be hit and miss on these screws, you might get lucky but I would stick to just calling around to the local repair shops. BestBuy and other larger stores that do repairs might have spare screws as well, but they could just as easily be mailing the systems out for repair and not have any so I would only bother to ask if you were already at the store for something else.
Also, pay attention to the head of the screw, HP typically uses Torx instead of Phillips and in turn if the shop mostly services HP they may default to giving you screws with Torx heads instead. This isn’t necessarily bad, just something to be aware of.
So far, the first computer shop (a mac shop) said they “didn’t have screws” which I found pretty amazing. I think he meant he didn’t have those screws, but still…
That’s my experience so far as well. Like I found this box but it’s all hex caps and may not fit right in the librem. (Same with the ones from Fastenal.) Then I found those screws that I can mail order one at a time (but that seems totally silly). Then Walmart (ugh) has this pack of 8 screws for 14$ (!) but that seems really expensive, more than a dollar per screw!!
Yeah, I think that’s what I’ll end up doing…
Yeah, I’m trying to stick with the same screwdriver pattern so this thing doesn’t become a total mess. Many heads I find are hex, which is annoying…
A cool thing with the philips head that ship with the librem is that you might be able to unscrew them with your fingernail or something. Not so with hex (let alone torx) screws.
Thanks for the feedback!
PS: By the way, one annoying thing with this affair is that I didn’t just “lose” the screw while opening the case. I’m normally pretty diligent at collecting all the parts when I do repairs and rarely lost anything that way. I believe they just fell off somewhere later by becoming lose. I have now tightened the other bolts, and they were kind of lose so that’s something to be aware of when doing repairs on the librem…
I recently put an additional ssd in my Librem13v4 and compared the screws to the pictures in the wiki which are for Librem13v3. I’m pretty sure that my screws of different length were not distributed the same over the back of the notebook as shown in the wiki.
I guess I also took a picture, but can’t get to it at the moment.
Either there are some screws mixed up in my notebook - even though they fit and were easy to screw in or the pictures could need an update for the newer version Librem13v4 - maybe someone from support can shed some light on it @joao.azevedo?
You know, I think it’s fair to assume I know how to search the Amazon website, thanks. To quote my original post:
So yeah, there’s always the worst case scenario (Amazon or Walmart), but I’d like to figure out how to avoid that. I found a few local electronics stores I need to call, I’ll let you folks know if that’s useful.
kinda. it confirms an experiment i did here where the laptop was able to accept a HDD screw. it’s also a M2x4, from visual inspection, but with a flat torx head, which is inconvenient, but still holds the case together.
FWIW, I picked up this pack of M2 countersunk screws off of NewEgg and replaced all of the screws on the bottom of my two year old Librem 15 rev3. These are definitely the best replacement screws I’ve tried so far…
Woah, really? I had no idea that it was a modded Acer chassis! Any chance you have more info on this (Like model?)
Btw, In addition to screws, all of my rubber feet fell off within the first year of light use… Support just told me to keep an eye on their store for them, but I’m not seeing anything. I think I’ll just buy some random feet and superglue those on (since nothing seems to stick to this matte chassis). Only problem is finding them. Thankfully though, they don’t cover any screw holes like most laptops!
To quote my original post:
