That's a great question, and it's one we've been trying to answer for a while now. That guide—like so much other content on our site—is user-contributed, so we can't control whatever path the author decides to take on their repair journey. We recently added a new flag to our collection to add to guides like this: the Scenic Route flag. The addition of this flag will let other users know that there's an easier way to remove the optical drive, but that this guide will still get the job done. If we're lucky, it might even persuade someone to create the "correct" guide themselves. It's also important to mention that this guide isn't totally worthless just because it follows a slightly more circuitous route. You mention the quick release mechanism, and that is certainly the preferred method for optical drive removal if it's accessible. In the event that the quick release on someone's laptop is broken or malfunctioning, though, it may be necessary for them to disassemble the entire laptop and take the drive out,...

While the length of this answer may seem intimidating, I want to start off by saying that you wrote an excellent guide, Mr. Turkey. This critique is not just for you to reference to go back and improve your guide, but for any user on iFixit to refer to and make all of their contributions to our site even better. With that being said, here is my review of your Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S650 Lens Assembly repair guide. Enjoy :] Any guide where you are disassembling the device to remove a specific component should be an "Installation" guide, not a "Repairing" one. Repairing the lens assembly would entail separating all of the optical elements and refurbishing the assembly to working condition. Just like for a device page, the summary of a guide should be an extremely brief overview of the procedure being performed. In this case, something like "Replacing a seized lens assembly in the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S650." would be sufficient. Again, the majority of information should be in the introduction, not the summary....

First and foremost, all of the guides you contributed are awesome tutorials. If every user on our site wrote as many guides as you, I wouldn't have a job. Some of the tips that I have for you will apply to all of your guides, so I'll dedicate this answer to those. Even though you're thinking about the particular component that you're writing the guide for, you can't forget about everything that stood in your way before you got there. If you have to take out the battery, outer case, and LCD before you remove the lens assembly in a camera, then you have four guides there, rather than one. Make the first guide and then start the next one where the first left off. Use the prerequisite guide feature on the Details page to import the beginning steps, rather than rewriting them. This is the same method we use and it makes writing 40 or 50 step guides much less tedious. I touched on photos briefly when I talked about device pages, but I'll go into more detail here for guides. When it comes to light, you don't just...

Hey there Mr. Turkey, This particular critique applies to all of the device pages that you created, since an answer for each individual wiki would be more than I am willing to write and beyond what you want to read. Be sure to research the ins and outs of a company's naming conventions for the sake of getting the device page url correct. You nailed Kodak's camel-cased 'S' in EasyShare, but tripped up a little on Sony's odd Cyber-shot title. On a similar note, device names shouldn't include anything other than the make and model. Extra identifiers, such as "LCD TV", will be handled by the category link. Device page summaries shouldn't be more than a sentence or two. This is the quick snippet of information that will show up in search results to help users figure out if that's the device they're looking for. The meat and potatoes of the device page should be in the body. In addition, we use fancy wiki formatting to split the page into a few basic sections. Background and Identification covers the details of...

The only real hardware differences you'll find, probably, are all going to be connectivity related. The XT910 is the developer edition with an unlockable bootloader that supports quad band GSM and CDMA without LTE. Motorola: XT910 and XT912

We have a tendency to make a lot of pop culture references when we write our teardowns; readers seem to really enjoy it. The statement that severing the fragile ribbon cable would be "bad, mmkay?" was a reference to South Park's Mr. Mackey, who is famous for his "drugs are bad" speech. I apologize if the remark came off as offensive or unprofessional.

Hi Tony, the Pro Tech Base Toolkit includes our 54 Bit Driver Kit, which comes with Pentalobe 2, 5, and 6 bits. The Pentalobe 2 bit is the smallest size we have and is the correct size for the iPhone.

Awesome job! Thanks for pitching in and helping improve it. There are still a number of items that haven't been taken care of: (1) the pictures after the battery removal step show the battery still installed (2) each guide step is a complete sentence and should be punctuated as such (3) the word "Phillips" when talking about screws is not spelled correctly or capitalized (4) screw lengths are not stated (5) PC guides should use "motherboard" instead of "logic board" I was able remove the "Missing Prerequisites" flag and replace it with "Inconsistent Prerequisites." You may fix the items I listed above, but "Inconsistent Prerequisites" will remain until new pictures are taken. Maybe someone else can pick up where you left off!

Yes, all of our guides (with the exception of teardowns) are available as PDFs. Right above the first step there is a "Formats" tab with options for slideshow, XML, PDF, and our embeddable widget.

Remember that our entire site is wiki-based, so someone else could have made edits to the guide. It's not just the guide author that can make edits.