Opening your VAIO - part 2

My SONY VAIO notebook. In the previous post you can read something of my not-working keyboard, so now I have to open it again.. While taking some photos of course :-).

The first thing we have to take off is the battery.
To access anything inside the laptop, we first have to remove silver panel just above the keyboard - because some of the screws are beneath that panel.
To take this panel off, take out all screws on the red marked positions (at the image, not on your laptop - unless you've marked them red yourself like I did).

Now take out the DVD drive. This is because there's a tiny bracket positioned over there - if you don't release it, the front panel won't come off

The tiny bracket. Push it away with a small screwdriver.

Now, take that small screwdriver again, to push away some more brackets. Try to find them (it's quite easy if your screwdriver isn't too large and you are careful) and release them with a "click". When the front panel is no longer fixed on the front side, it's time for the next step.


At the back side of the front panel, there are more brackets - I've marked them on these photos. Be careful! Maybe you've to change the position of the laptop screen a few times to release the front panel totally. This I find the most difficult point myself.


The front panel's off! In order to remove the keyboard, only three more screws need to be removed. The first two are just on the place where the front panel used to be.
The third one is on the other side. Remove the cap protecting your memory modules (that's the one in the center) and in the upper right corner of there's our final screwed friend.
Now the keyboard should be free! You can take it off - be careful with the cable (it's long enough, but anyway). Maybe in another post I'll show how to open the rest of the notebook, but I think this will be enough for today.

Opening your VAIO - part 1

A while ago, when trying to install certain version of Mac OS X Leopard on my VAIO-FZ19VN notebook (OSX86), I read somewhere that my Intel wireless network card would not work in Mac OS X, but according to some people on the net it should be easy to replace.

And I got myself two notebooks over here! No, that's not because I have too much money, and no, it's not a PC and a Mac, alas.
My second notebook, an HP laptop, I bought second hand from my mother. She used it for about 1,5 year and about that time errors began to happen. Strange lines across the screen, and the system hanging time after time. Nowadays, I even can't install Windows - only some Linux-versions will boot in this strange machine. But it HAS a wireless network card - Broadcom, so it should work under Mac OS X.

It was not very difficult to open my VAIO, if I had known how. Anyway, I figured it out without damaging my notebook.
Once it was open, it became clear that the slot containing the network card in the VAIO was different from the slot in the HP, so I had to put the whole laptop back together, without any changes made.

Next day, when I was entering in the minutes at a meeting, some of the keys on my keyboard stopped working. So I had to substitute each "r", "u", "f", "j" - and some other keys.
And I had to open my notebook again - my keyboard cable was not connected properly.
This second time opening my notebook, I've taken some photos for all VAIO users out there who want to open their laptops for one or another reason. I'll post them in my next post