Gateway tower front cover mystery

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Hugh_Mungus

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May 11, 2013
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I am trying to help a friend with her computer and one thing is baffling me. She has a Gateway desktop whose DVD player failed so I replaced it with one from another computer. The DVD player works fine now.

However, the front cover of the tower is very strange. The tower has two bays suitable for optical drives at the top and there are two hinged doors that correspond to those bays in the front cover of the tower. Unfortunately, the front cover also has two rather tall crossbraces - one at the lower end of each bay - that effectively block all access to the eject button on the DVD drive!

Naturally, this makes use of the DVD drive problematic: if she can't open the drawer, she can't do much with the DVD drive. Now, I suppose she could get used to using the Eject option in Windows but I have to believe that there is some way to remove this crossbrace to get it out of the way. I can't believe Gateway would be foolish enough to put fixed crossbraces on their covers that prevent you from using the devices you are installing.

The thing is that I can't figure out how to remove the crossbrace that is interfering with her DVD drive. At one end, it looks like it is actually the same piece as the rest of the front cover. But there is a sort of a slide-knob towards the other side which may be a release of some kind although pushing it hasn't had any visible effect.

I've never seen a Gateway before so I have no idea about the various "tricks" that a computer tech would know for dealing with them. Does anyone here have any familiarity with Gateway front covers and how to remove those crossbraces?

 
Solution
hang-the-9
There are cases where that type of bar pushes on the drive so you push on the closed bay door as Hugh_Mungus said above ^, it presses into the drive open button and it opens, that way you have a neat case appearance. Picture of the setup would help, including how the case looks when closed and model of the computer.
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Hugh_Mungus

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Its button was also covered by the crossbrace. She inherited the computer from someone else - a family member who passed away - so I'm not sure if she knows how they got the DVD drive open. Perhaps they used the Eject option in Windows?

Frankly, she didn't even realize the computer *had* a DVD drive. She didn't notice that there was a hinged door covering the bay: she thought it was a solid cover.
 
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Hugh_Mungus

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May 11, 2013
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Actually, it was also covered by the crossbrace. She had asked me to add a DVD drive to the computer because she didn't realize it already had one; she hadn't noticed that two hinged doors on the upper part of the tower front cover and it wasn't originally her computer so she hadn't used it.

Perhaps her brother (the previous owner, who passed away) used the Eject within Windows. Or maybe he didn't know there was a DVD drive in the computer either ;-)

The drive was not showing up in Windows when I looked in File Explorer so I thought one of the connectors might have come off but they were both still there and connected. I'm guessing it just died somewhere along the line and the previous owner never bothered to do anything about it because he wasn't using it anyway.
 
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Hugh_Mungus

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May 11, 2013
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I didn't notice an eject button on the side of the case but I wasn't looking for one either. I'll have to look for that when I go back there. Or maybe the user is supposed to push on the crossbrace and it has enough give in it to push the eject button?

I like your idea better; it seems more plausible. You never know kind of weird tricks the designers will come up with.

I remember a friend who had a Peugeot sedan that was pretty much identical to the one Columbo drove. The gas tank access was beneath the right rear taillight: the taillight was hinged and when you lifted it up, you could see where to put the hose at the gas pump. He used to love going to self-serve gas stations and seeing the attendant try to figure out how to put gas in the car. Very few of them ever figured it out on their own. I've never quite made up my mind whether that was good design or really stupid design. I liked the elegance of not seeing a gas cap sticking out of the side of the car but hiding it just made it a pain for anyone not familiar with that "trick". Kinda like this crossbrace issue....
 
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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

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Mar 25, 2010
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There are cases where that type of bar pushes on the drive so you push on the closed bay door as Hugh_Mungus said above ^, it presses into the drive open button and it opens, that way you have a neat case appearance. Picture of the setup would help, including how the case looks when closed and model of the computer.
 
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