Why Dell, why?

The postmortem on my desktop continues, this week I've been stalled on getting the drives out. Not because I don't know how to do that, but because Dell had decided to be clever.

The D drive came out easily enough - undo cables, undo two screws, cage slides out easily enough, and then it's just 4 screws to get the drive out of the cage, and popping it into an external enclosure confirms it's fine.

The C drive was another matter, and what exactly is the use of a manual that says "we're about to switch to a blue plastic cage for the primary drive, if you come across one follow the instructions for using that" but doesn't give those instructions? Now it actually came out easily enough, just squeeze a couple of tabs and the cage slides out. But the drive isn't screwed into the cage, it's held in with four metal pins that are fixed into the cage and project into the screw holes on the drive. Even having googled "blue dell drive cage" to get the instructions didn't help, because they basically showed you flexing the cage in two sideways to pop the drive free, and my hands don't appear to be strong enough/able to get a good enough grip to be able to do that. Quite by chance I found a way to do it this afternoon, there's enough flex around the tabs to pop the pins free if you flex it one corner at a time. This is of course exactly the opposite of the instructions. Why Dell, why?

(It's probably one of those changes that saves them about 0.001p per PC because it's marginally quicker to swap the drives around in the plastic cages when they're installing Windows because the techs only need to squeeze two tabs, not screw two screws).

And of course when I checked the drive it isn't working, though as it's recognised as a drive and isn't making any horrible clunking noises I'm hoping it's recoverable and just needs rebuilding with the appropriate software (I did have some years ago and have done it previously, but I think I need to look up what's available and cheap currently - any recommendations gratefully received!).

So as I'm stuck with just laptop for a while yet I've just spent half an hour disconnecting the dektop from keyboard, screen etc and clearing space on my desk so that my laptop can sit there connected to them instead, because that means I won't be tempted just to curl up on my bed with it all day, which is probably not doing my body any good and is certainly not great for my mental health.

*headdesk* computers *headtesk*