Creating a Repair Guide

Contents

Which guides?

The number of possible repair guides will vary substantially depending on the complexity of a device. For example, the iPod Nano 3rd Generation has only four guides for the entire device. In contrast, the MacBook Core Duo has more than 30 repair guides. To come up with a preliminary list of repair guides, try to determine the discrete components that exist within your device. You may be able to find a manufacturer's part list or exploded view, but if not, this may require taking your device apart.

An example list of all components inside an imaginary laptop:

  1. Battery
  2. RAM
  3. Keyboard
  4. Hard Drive
  5. Optical Drive
  6. Heat Sink
  7. Battery Connector
  8. Left Speaker
  9. Right Speaker
  10. Display Assembly

In choosing from this list, look for components that people want to upgrade, or components that break and need to be replaced. For example, on the above list, the RAM, hard drive, and optical drive are potential upgrades. The battery, keyboard, and display assembly are components that potentially wear out or break. Using this insight, we can narrow the list of components down to a shorter list that includes the most useful guides:

  1. Battery
  2. RAM
  3. Keyboard
  4. Hard Drive
  5. Optical Drive
  6. Display Assembly

Prerequisites

Each guide should be a completely independent step-by-step tutorial. What? That sounds like a lot of duplicated work? You're right. That's why you can build on your existing guides by using prerequisites.

Prerequisites let you add the steps from existing guides to the beginning of your guide, so that they show up before the steps that you write. For example, in most devices you'll want to remove the battery early in the repair process. Instead of having to include a step explaining how to remove the battery at the beginning of every guide, you can write the battery removal guide once, and then select the battery guide as a prerequisite in future guides. Here's a guide for removing a MacBook battery. The battery removal guide is a prerequisite for the MacBook RAM guide. You can see that the first two steps of the MacBook RAM guide are actually the steps for removing the battery.

Block Image

Click to enlarge image! Compare it to the MacBook Core Duo guides on our site.

Effective use of prerequisites can be a huge time saver, but there are potential pitfalls. You can only use prerequisites for portions of the disassembly that are sequential. Let's consider our imaginary laptop again. After researching the design of the device, we've concluded that the components can be removed in the following order:

1. Battery

2. RAM

3. Keyboard

4. Hard Drive

4. Optical Drive

4. Display Assembly

Notice that the hard drive, optical drive, and display assembly all share the same number. This means that once you've removed the first three components, you can choose to remove any of the next three. The hard drive is not a prerequisite for the optical drive because you do not have to remove the hard drive to take out the optical drive. This can get tricky to keep track of in your head, so drawing a tree diagram showing the order components are removed from your device may be helpful.

Another thing to watch out for when using prerequisites is to make sure the prerequisite guide remains generic enough to be included in several different guides. For example, a given part can often be both removed and replaced. Removal is getting the part out of the device, while replacement includes swapping it with a new part. After removal, the component might still include attached screws, cables, or brackets. If the guide is used as a prerequisite, the guide should only include the removal of the component.

If you're completely confused now, you're not alone. Perhaps a concrete example will help. On the MacBook, the optical drive guide shows how to remove the drive, along with its attached cable and brackets, from the computer. If you wanted to replace your optical drive, the optical drive replacement guide includes the details for removing the cable and brackets. You wouldn't want to use the optical drive replacement guide as a prerequisite, since there's no need to remove the cable and brackets from the drive unless you're replacing it. Prerequisites simply explain how to remove a component to enable access to other components (e.g. removing the optical drive is a prerequisite to replacing the lower case).

Creating a Guide

Go here to start a new guide. Bookmark it for future reference, as most likely you will be creating more than one guide.

The Intro Page

  • Click on the blue text (Such as the word "activity" in in the first field, "Choose an activity") to get an explanation of the field you're filling out. For example, clicking on "activity" will pop up this message on top of the page: "What are you doing? Select the verb that best describes it. If you're not sure, choose 'Installing'."
  • Estimate the time under the "time required," and make sure to verify that estimate once you're done with the guide.
  • You may or may not know all the tools required to take your device apart when you create the guide. Make sure to check this field once you have the guide completed.
  • Once you click "Save," click on the "+ add step" button on the right side to begin adding steps to your guide.