What the hell are these?

[Sharcs]

My friend's laptop would not power up so he gave it to me to fix it. I already knew that the problem was not the battery or the power chord, so I decided to start off by resetting the bios by removing the cmos battery temporarily.

When I took the laptop apart I found these clips loose inside (picture below). One of the clips was lodged onto an exposed section of the motherboard and I figured that it was shorting out the motherboard, causing the no-power problem. I removed all the loose clips (3 of them), put the laptop back together and luckily it hadn't caused any permanent damage - laptop booted first time.

My question is this, what the hell are these clips and where did they come from?
Are they important?

Laptop is a Dell Vostro 3550

 

[Laptop_Nerd]

Hi,

Based from this video tutorial I watched it seems like it's a retaining clip that's located around where the RAM is located. There should be a total of 6 clips like that around it.

Here's the video where I somehow guess where I saw that clips:
https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSzStcU9aZY

 

[Sharcs]

Hi,

Based from this video tutorial I watched it seems like it's a retaining clip that's located around where the RAM is located. There should be a total of 6 clips like that around it.

Here's the video where I somehow guess where I saw that clips:
https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSzStcU9aZY

You're right, I found the other three in place around the ram housing. It appears that the 3 rogue clips broke off somehow, which also explains the bits of plastic I found earlier. My friend is really lucky that these little clips didn't short out his mobo permanently.

Anyways, thanks a lot, appreciated.