Working with Laptop Hardware

By Jerry Pournelle

May 29, 2006

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By the time you see this, I'll just be getting back from WinHEC, where, with luck, I'll have learned a lot more about Vista--when it will be out, and what features it will have. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, back to the saga of Lisabetta, my HP Compaq TabletPC 1100tc, whose hard drive needed replacing.

Working with laptop hardware can be intimidating. Desktop systems are big, and you can see what everything does. Laptops are expensive. They are sealed up, everything is small, and for me at least there's always the fear that I'll muck it up completely; all of which explains why I never replaced the hard drive on a laptop until now.

To Compaq's great credit, the HP Compaq TabletPC 1100tc is extraordinarily easy to work on. Everything is laid out logically, and there are no real surprises. Let me caution you that this won't be the case with all laptops. Dan Spisak assures me that changing the hard drive on an Apple PowerBook, for example, is possible, but it's a real pain in the nether regions, and that will be true of many other systems not designed for easy maintainability. I was able to muddle through without problems, but I can't guarantee you'll have the same results.

Unless you know what you're doing, the proper way to go about this is to get the service manuals for the system you're working on. Those won't always be easy to obtain, but it's generally worth the effort. I didn't bother, and all came out well, but as I said, the Compaq TabletPC was designed for maintainability. Many laptops are not.

Getting Started

The first thing was to remove the keyboard. Convertible TabletPC's are designed for this. There's a release catch, and the keyboard pulls right out. The holes for the keyboard attachments go deep into the computer unit, so I thoughtfully inserted the directing tube of a can of compressed air into one and used it to blow out the inner compartment just in case my heating problems stemmed from blocked vents or clogged filters. I'm disappointed to say there was no cloud of dust or dog hair, so I have no idea whether that did any good.

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