HOWTO: Get Under the Hood of the X1000 (by Dan)

[kf_man]

This is a pictorial guide to taking apart your X1000. It is meant to supplement the authorized service manual available here.

Taking apart your X1000 is a fundamental step in any one of the following endeavors you may wish to pursue:

• Changing your processor
• Changing your video card
• drilling your motherboard for lightness (not recommended)
• many more, probably

Preliminary steps:

• Get a towel or something soft to put your laptop upside down on. This will prevent it from getting scratched.
• It may be good to cover your screen with the film that was included in shipping originally.
• Get some organizing bins for screws. There are a lot of them and several lengths too.
• L3 - PM2.5x3.0
• L5 - PM2.5x5.0
• L7 - PM2.5x7.0
• L15 - PM2.5x15.0
• Ground yourself

Getting started:

• Remove Battery by sliding battery tab.
• Remove Harddisk:
• Remove the two L7 screws.
• Use recess to leverage harddisk up with a flat blade screwdriver or your fingernail.
• Remove CD-ROM
• Remove one L7 screw
• Use fingernail or flat blade screwdriver under the face of the drive to leverage out CD-ROM
• Unhook the main and auxiliary WIFI antennae
• Unscrew the one L5 screw from the WIFI access panel
• Leverage under recess to remove access panel
• Lift straight up to remove the antennae pictured below (pic stolen from ft):
  
• Note: you don't have to remove the mini-pci card, just the antennae
• Remove the two L15 screws that fasten the keyboard

Ok, now you can flop it over and get ready for:

Removing the keyboard:

• Slide all four tabs in the direction of the arrows in the picture above.
• Lift up from the tab side of keyboard.
• Fold keyboard (keys down) onto touchpad taking care not to yank out the conducting ribbon out of the motherboard as pictured below.
  
• Now, remove the ribbon from the motherboard by lifting the tabs on the ribbon connector as shown below. The ribbon should freely pull out now and you can stow the keyboard someplace while you forge ahead
  
• With the keyboard removed, you are ready for the sketchiest part which is removal of the switch cover. Now, don't worry if you screw this up 'cause the cover is almost free ($165) at HP PartSurfer

Removing the switch cover:

• Close laptop.
• You need to pry the outer part of the hinge cover from the top of the case. The gap is very small to nonexistant so try this:
• Start with a utility or exacto knife to establish a gap on hinge cover as shown above.
• Follow up with a narraw flat head blade to snap the hinge cover loose.
• Repeat for other side.
• Now, open the laptop all the way to where touchpad and screen are both pointing straight up.
• Pry up on switch cover along the red outline of the picture below. It is easiest to start from the right side and work your way to the left. Be careful, this part is fragile and not especially easy to snap off. Make sure not to use fragile parts below as leverage points to pry off the cover.
  

If you made it through the last part, congratulations on your nerves of steel. It is all downhill from here.

Removing the LCD Display (Not required for processor upgrade):

• Remove the L15 screw
• Pry up from where arrow indicates to disconnect the display cable
• Pull cable out of its route and set aside somewhere where you can safely close the laptop lid without the connector applying pressure to the screen.
• Close laptop lid and flip over as shown below:
  
• Remove the two L7 screws
• Remove the one L7 screw
• Repeat for the other side
• Now you can open the laptop lid and the display should freely slide out of the base. Stow the display while you continue ahead or if you were upgrading to the WUXGA for cheap, then installation is the reverse of removal.

Only a little bit left to go, time for:

Removing the volume adjuster speaker cover thingy:

• Remove volume harness by prying up gently by sides of harness connector.
• Remove three L5 screws.
• Remove one L3 screw.
• Lift by the fan cover sheet metal until the L3 cover has clearance above the L3 screw boss.
• Now, slide upward to release clips on the bottom. The cover should come out freely now.

Now we can prepare for:

Removing the fan:
Check out the speaker, it's like a 6x9 for a squirrel.

• Unplug the fan harness by prying on edge of connector
• Remove L5 screw
• Lift out blower wheel

If you are doing a processor upgrade you are pretty much done with this guide and can proceed to:

How to upgrade your processor w/ pics

If you are after the video card or just out for adventure, we must press forward

Removing the top of the case (Not required for processor upgrade):
Note: I did not have the most appropriate pics for these dissassembly steps so some components are pictured that you will have already removed.

• Unplug speaker harnesses
• Disconnect ribbon cable using procedure similar to keyboard ribbon
• Pull Auxiliary and Main WIFI antennae cables through this opening
• Unplug this harness
• Remove two L7 screws
• Remove one L5 screw
• Remove one L3 (small thread pitch) screw
• Flip laptop over face down on towel

Next step:

• Unscrew three L7 screws
• Unscrew three L5 screws
• Unscrew six L15 screws
• Flip back over
• Starting from front and moving backwards, snap upper part away from the base.

If you made it this far, you can see that anything else you want to do is pretty much within an easy reach. The finished result should look something like these:



See the processor and video upgrading guides linked at the top of this post.

-Dan

[prthealien]

Do I have to remove the top case and screen to get to the power connector, or can I just remove the bottom case? I just need to replace this part:

[kf_man]

Honestly, I'm not sure.  My computer is still under warranty so I pretty much leave it alone.  Maybe someone else can shed a bit more light on the topic.

[x1000talk]

For the removing the keyboard part, which is refered to by the cpu upgrade howto, I would make sure you mention the two keyboard screws on the bottom (which may be mentioned way earlier but is not part of the keyboard removal process).