Repairing Laptops

[OwenTMoL]

A friend on my Dad has two laptops.
One is out of date and one is broken.
They're giving them to me (Which is nice of them) and they said I can try to play around with the broken one and see if I can get it working.
I've never looked inside a laptop before however and I have no idea what's wrong with it yet. If anyone can tell me that basics about laptop internals.
I'd just like to know about them before I look into cracking it open and seeing if I can fix it.
Anyone?

[Grey M@a]

There is nothing that much different on Laptops to that of a PC, although you will find almost everything is on board. One thing to note with laptops is when you take all the screws out the bottom open the case slowly as some manufactures will tape the power cables to the upper case so if you pull it hard enough you will actually rip it from the motherboard, this is normally the case for toshiba's and compaq laptops. Depending on what is broken on the laptop you may have problems sourcing parts for it, especially in the case of the motherboards etc which in most cases will have to be a quick call to the manufacturer then they will bowl you over with a silly price tag. Ebay would be your best bet if you can find the parts.

Be careful of the ribon cables for the keyboard and screen etc as they are fragile as hell, any extended pulling or pressure on them they will physically just snap in your hands, make sure all clips are un-done before taking the ribons out as they are not tailed like a normal IDE just an open end.

If there is anything else you want to know give me a shout

Cheers

Fox

[OwenTMoL]

Thanks.
I'll tell you how it is when It arrives (could actually be a while) but I hope I can fix it up.

[Dorza]

Also, there isnt much which is standardized in laptops. Manufacturers tend to have their own way of connecting everything together, and where they place everything.Because of this finding spares specific to the lt could be tricky.