How to take apart a laptop-The N00B way

By: Ryan

Do you have a laptop that is old, broken, making weird noises, or overheating, than maybe you need to open up your old laptop. I owned a HP Pavilion n5430 laptop, and it started to make weird noises when the CPU fan turned on. After this started to happen, my computer started to crash, and gave me many BSOD's (blue screens of death). I decided to open up this notebook, and clean it, and possibly look for any possible damaged hardware from the hundreds of times I have dropped it.

I first unscrewed the memory slot screws, and opened the slots, and removed the ram.

After this, remove all the screws that surround the notebook, except the ones that hold the other cover down, and there are 2 in the back, by the parallel port.

(please note that the ram slot is not open, and this is a error on my part, please open the ram slot first, or damage may occur)

Next, you need to bend the notebook back like this, and pry the power switch/LED indicator panel off.

You need to unscrew the screw that holds the pcb down, pull the pcb out, and unscrew the screws that hold down the screen. After you do this, you need to pull the screen off, and the other cable that it is connected to.

To pull the keyboard out, you need to unscrew the 2 screws that hold it down, and pull it towards the tap pad. After this, your notebook should be like this:

After I inspected this, I realized that the hard drive was loose, and tightened it back up, and the BSODS went away, but still had the cpu fan problem.

I decided to put the laptop back together, sprayed some compressed air into the cpu fan, and a huge amount of dust came out. It ran normal when I booted it up. I found out that this is a common problem on this notebook, and many others have had the same problems also. This project took about 30 minutes, and you should have general PC hardware knowledge to do this.

This guide was made by Ryan