moltar wrote:I just switched the mobo today, which is screwed to the bottom shell basically. It's not hard, but tedious. You have to take everything out basically. What I did is take pics of every screw next to the hole it came out of on my iPhone, and then put them all back in reverse order. Took me about 1.5h for the mobo replacement. It was my first time doing this model.
Agreed, when I built my T60 I had a purchased parts machine and a new base & mobo. It was my first time even looking at the inside of a T60 but I was able to strip the "parts" T60 and transfer everything onto the new T60 mobo and install it in the new base without too much trouble. IIRC, the routing of the USB wires was about the hardest thing to do.
Moltar's advise to take pictures is really good as it is essential that you remember what screws go where. Trust me about a 1/4 of the way through you'll have a ton of screws out and they will all start to look relatively the same. If you don't know which screw goes into which hole you'll end up doubling your reassembly time as well as risk driving improper length screws into holes. I didn't take pictures instead I used some masking tape and just created (area) screw groupings.
The key is to take you time, don't force anything, use the HMM and above all
be organized. I also recently changed the lid to a brand new one and that was about a 1hr job. Routing the antenna wires was the hardest part of the lid assembly.
I will say there is nothing more aesthetically pleasing than clean/new plastics on a machine. With a new base, lid and keyboard my T60 looks like it was just unboxed yesterday
. For me having the laptop look so visually appealing was well worth the time and effort that I had to put into breaking everything down and reassembling it.
Also if you're going to do this I'd advise doing all your upgrades at one time. For example if you're thinking about shimming your fan, changing your fan, changing your heatsink, or changing your processor, get those parts before you start and just do them as you go. And since you're in there do not forget to apply some new AS5 (Arctic Silver 5) to your CPU/heatsink.
There is also one big hidden advantage of doing this. Having stripped and reassembled your T60 you'll get a really good understanding of how it works and where everything fits. That's important because it gives you confidence and renders any future labor a breeze as you kind of know where everything goes.
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