Now came the exciting part.....how nervous was I.......just a little to start with and then when it was all stripped and ready for first boot out of its case VERY, I made sure the kids were in bed and I told my wife to take cover!

The very start, the top cover, note non magnetised srewdriver, very important

Fortuantley I stumbled, with the help of Google (who is a good friend of mine by the way) upon a service manual for my Compaq laptop thanks to a great site that you may find here http://www.eserviceinfo.com they have no end of manuals and schematics for electronic bits and bobs, thanks to them for providing a free download service.  I carefully followed the disassembly destructions and in fact it made it somewhat of a breeze, nothing snapped or broke and I only sliced through one finger on some very sharp tin plate, luckily page 128 of the manual (page 30 of 33 I printed out) was nearby and blotted up the blood for a while before finally caving in and resorting to a Winnie the Pooh plaster, why do we only have kids plaster in our house.......reminder to self (or better still the wife) ....need adult plasters!

Keyboard first, simply move 4 latches, take mental note (although manual is more reliable) of cable positions and remove GENTLY, unscrew screws from bottom and then prise GENTLY the upper part of the laptop, this housed the trackpad buttons and power buttons, all of which I may need, I didn't know at the time.

Aaarggghhhh! Electronic parts, I was starting to get worried!

Next came the metal cover hiding the motherboard, this had on it the power control unit and the trackpoint buttons, real electronic parts, PCB's with lots of solder, microswitches and resitors and transistors probably and other parts I just don't understand, I would like to understand, but at the moment don't, perhaps I should go back to college.

The motherboard - Tah dah!

Next up was the motherboard, I had to remove the power supply first and a Modem/Lan module and a few other wires, plus to get this out of the base I needed to remove the heatsink.  I have done this on desktop computers before (and this is where i confess to having built Desktop Pc's in the past, but its not rocket science.....plug and play as they say) but trying to remove this heatsink from the CPU was like trying to pull an airliner with a rope (almost)! So guess what, the CPU came out of its socket instead, no big deal, as long as it still worked after I plugged it all back together.

The bottom section destructed!

The base is really not worth showing, the LCD is worth showing, if I had remembered to photograph dismantling it.

But in the picture below you can see it out of its casing.

My hands were sweating with fear at first dissasembled boot!

So here it is all out of its case and looking somewhat reminisent of a pile of scrap.  My main problem was the length of the ribbon from the on board video to the back of the LCD, I had very little room to manauvere the parts around, as you see it pictured here it was very unstable, if I had blown on it the whole thing would have fallen apart!  I attached the keyboard as I had read someone elses attempt at making a DPF only to find it wouldn't boot without the keyboard attached, I later found out I could do away with it.

So finally the moment of truth had arrived, I plugged in the cable pushed down the switch and.........no bang, I was amazed........however without pushing any power buttons the laptop came to life, just by putting the power on at the socket, it still does this and I'm not sure why, I can shut it down and start it from the power button, but if I unplug it from the wall and plug it in again it starts up automatically.  This is no problem though as it is never turned off (boos and hisses from green people, but please read on).

Now it was all apart and working all I had to do was put it all together and STILL make it work!

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