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Easy To Fix Notebooks?

post #1 of 7
4/18/07 at 1:02am
Thread Starter 
My wife has an older Dell 9100, but one of the cool things about it is that one can turn it over on its back and remove the fan covers and clean the dust out. My Dell 9200 (and most of the other notebooks that I've seen) demand that you almost have to do major surgery just to get at the fans.

Is there any major maker of notebooks that typically make things like fans easily available for cleaning. I don't trust the shot of compressed air method. I'd like to find a notebook that had its fans, backup battery, and everything else easily available, like on most desktops.

-silverjim-
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post #2 of 7
4/18/07 at 8:48pm
Not likely anymore. The Latitude D800's CPU fan was removable in the same manner the i9100/XPS fans were. It was just a design decision on the part of Dell for that system. I wouldn't think of it as a common occurrence. And on the 9100 there was a third fan that you couldn't simply remove.

Dell and Thinkpads do have alot of effort put towards making the CMOS battery easily accessible. The battery on my D820 is easy to get to, not impossible like my old Inspiron 8200 (It was part of the palmrest). I don't work on any other brands often enough to give you an accurate picture of how easy it is to access their CMOS batteries.

I highly doubt you're going to find anybody with fans that are as easily removed as the ones on the Inspiron 9100.
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post #3 of 7
4/19/07 at 4:18am
Dells are custom assembled, so they must be easy to mantain.

Other brands are much more difficult to dissasemble / assemble.
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post #4 of 7
4/19/07 at 11:04pm
Though it is a bit pricey but my Alienware Aurora m9700 only takes 4 screws to remove the access panel to the CPU, GPU/S, RAM, and Fans. The 2 HDD's are also simple just dissable in the remove hardware setup and then unscrew one screw and pull them out.

The easiest and most accessable mobile system I've ever used and had to open up. I usually recommend cleaning out the cooling fans once a month however most every laptop maker doesn't make that a very easy task to accomplish.
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post #5 of 7
4/19/07 at 11:10pm
One thing I like about Sager laptops is they are fairly easy to dismantle. They have a lot of screws, but once you get the covers off, the heatsinks and fans are easily accessed. My laptop heatsinks both have large handles which help you lift them out (both Sagers).
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post #6 of 7
4/20/07 at 11:39pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by basicvisual
Though it is a bit pricey but my Alienware Aurora m9700 only takes 4 screws to remove the access panel to the CPU, GPU/S, RAM, and Fans.
Kewl. I wish Dell put just a bit more user-maintainance thought into their design. With these 17" giants, they basically have little more inside than their 15" counterparts. It couldn't take all that much to design a better use of all that extra space inside by making fans, etc, more accessable.
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post #7 of 7
4/29/07 at 2:12am
I've got a 3 year old Toshiba Satellite and it has a bottom panel you can open to clean the main heatsink. That panel uses small Torx-head screws, you might need to search the stores to find the proper screwdriver bits. I've not opened the panel yet due to not having the screwdriver. Possibly the CPU chip can be replaced at the same location.

This notebook also has 3 more removable panels that give access to the CD/DVD drive, hard drive, Wi-Fi board (it is replaceable), and RAM chips. And of course the battery is easily removed.

I'm going to upgrade the hard drive and RAM soon, it looks like I can do it myself. I've upgraded that stuff on a desktop PC before but the notebook is more challenging. However this Toshiba looks like it is more serviceable than some other notebooks.
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