Leftover part...

I took apart my Presario 1210US initially to replace a non working disk drive. After about 2 hours I decided it was a lot more work than it was worth plus there are some USB disk drives for less than replacement disk drives so I tried to put it back together. Unfortunately I got one leftover part that I have no idea if its important or not. See picture.

Any idea where that goes or if it's important?

Well, it looks important.

Is the machine already put back together and functioning properly? If so I probably wouldn't worry about it. Maybe turn it off and shake it around, listen for anything loose. It looks like a bracket, possibly for the hard drive to give it additional support.

I thought of that but I'm sure he means he replaced the optical drive not the hard drive.

Optical drive slides in and not fixed in but it could have been part that kept the connector from flexing too much. I haven't powered it yet as I'm still putting it back together... all the cables from disk drive, HD, battery connector, and track pad runs in one very tiny ares in the front middle of the laptop, and there's barely any room to work around. Those laptops are a major PITA to put together without a service manual that actually explains the *right* way to put it together.

That looks like something that would hold the monitor on.

It is probably an important part to keep a component cool. When I test booted the laptop, I can only run it for about 3 or 4 minutes then it hangs. The behavior suggest overheating system. I can't even complete memtest because it also hangs after a few minutes,

i would take it all apart again and figure out where that thing goes .... and take a look at the laptop service manual sticky so you can learn how to take apart and put back together your laptop...