Laptop Device Hardware and Replacement

0:00All right, as we get started here, taking a look at various replaceable components for portable devices, a preface it by saying not everything is replaceable. Some laptops, for example , will have replaceable batteries or memory, and others won't. You just can't. Sometimes it's kind of baked into the machine. There's really not a way to replace those items. So we'll be kind of taking a look at a variety of different things, but we're going to be starting here. First of all, with batteries, I'm going to start with taking a look at a couple of the older batteries.

0:30These are not a big emphasis for us, I don't think, because you don't see them as much as we used to. Nevertheless, you could possibly still run into old devices like this. So let's take a look here at batteries. We're starting with the old ones here, and the old one like a nickel cadmium battery, or what we used to just call a nikad, nikad battery. These came out quite a long time ago, like in the 1960s. There's old as I am. Okay, and they went up into the 90s. I used to work with these a lot in different areas.

1:02It's not all in computing kind of stuff. A lot of rechargeable batteries for flash guns that we'd use in photography. Those were very often nickel cadmium or camera batteries were very often nickel cadmium or some variant thereof. So we've been using these in a lot of different types of devices, including, again, of course, laptop computers and other portable devices. But let's take a look at some of the advantages of these batteries first, even though we don't use them very often anymore. One of those would be they do pretty well in extreme temps.

1:34Here in Phoenix, Arizona, where I live, it can get to 115 in the summertime. Sometimes a little bit more. We like to pretend as if it's always that hot here and we're suffering all the time. Usually it's only two or three times a year. It's to be that hot. Otherwise, it's usually in 110 is a common temperature for summertime temperatures. So that's one extreme. The other extreme would be extreme cold temperatures. So it can do well in that as well. Relatively speaking, no battery really thrives in extreme high or low temperatures, regardless of the chemical makeup of the battery.

2:09And if it's too cold, by the way, but it gets to be pretty cold, the batteries will discharge much faster in colder temperatures. So as a photographer, I use that camera that I'm being on right now to do landscapes. And if I'm in really cold environments, like when you're I was up in Montana in the winter and that was extremely cold, I had to keep a couple of spare batteries for my camera in my chest pocket in my jacket to keep it from getting too cold and discharging. But it can also handle rough handling.

2:40So these kinds of batteries in again, that's going to partially depend on what it's clad in, what kind of what kind of casing it's in that encloses that battery. Usually there's some kind of plastic that's formed around it or something like that. So it's so could have something to do with that as well. Also, Nick Academy of batteries and ICAD usually charge fairly fast. And that's just relative to other types of batteries. They also will have a fairly long life cycle if they are maintained properly. So that's again, one reason why am I still seeing ICADs somewhere from time to time.

3:13They do have something called a memory effect. Now that is something that's quite an annoyance. Let me tell you how that works out. So let's just say that this is a battery and I'll just do kind of a D battery or something like that. You get the idea. It just represents a battery. But over time, it's going to discharge, right? So this is 100% charge. This is 0%. And as it's charged to 100%, maybe we use it. So now maybe we use it down to, let's just say to hear, let's say now it's at 40% of it's available charge.

3:50At that point, we recharge it back up to 100%. Now what's going to happen is, especially if you do this multiple times, is it's going to remember that this is where it bottomed out, okay, when you started to charge it again. And so therefore, it's never going to give you this additional space down here. This all gets kind of wasted. Even when it's fully charged, it'll only discharge down to the 40% mark instead of going all the way down to 0. So that's the memory effect. There are chargers and methods that you can use to somewhat mitigate this.

4:24So for example, I've got chargers for this type of a battery that what they do is it's called reconditioning. And what it does is it, you know, for 100% here, or any percentage really, what it does is it completely discharges the battery on purpose down to 0% for that kind of a charger. And it can then kind of reset the memory effect so that 0 is truly 0, okay? Anyway, that's the memory effect. There's also toxicity. It's the cadmium that's the issue here in this chemical composition.

4:56Usually, I can't remember which one's which, but usually one of the chemical components is the positive, the other one's the negative. And that's how it flows the electricity or the power, the current through the battery. Well, the cadmium is kind of difficult to dispose of and difficult to recycle. Now, that's not something that we would do on our own. Anyway, we would take it somewhere and have a recycling center recycle it. But it's a challenge for them to be able to recycle that cadmium compared to certain other kinds of battery. So the other kind of battery that we'll talk about here is a nickel metal hydr ide or an NIMH.

5:33There's not really a nickname for this that I know of. This came out in the 1980s and into the 2000s. So you're probably more likely to see these. They do have some advantages. So they're 40% more energy density in this type of a battery. So in the same form factor, relatively speaking here, I'm not being scientific about this. The same form factor is this, if this is a nikad and this other one is a nickel metal hydride. In the same form factor, you're probably going to get 40% more out of this type of a battery than you would out of the same battery in a nikad.

6:09This can vary from manufacturer, the way it's processed, all that kind of stuff . But that's the general idea. Now these are also generally less toxic and therefore easier to recycle and/or dispose of. Disadvantages here. So all batteries will self-discharge. As the battery sits on the shelf, you might have a charge at 100%. And then over weeks and months of time, it'll slowly start to discharge, even if you're not really using it. And again, that's true of any battery, but it's more true of a nickel metal hy dride than certain other batteries.

6:44They also are known to have a somewhat shorter lifespan, again, compared to nik ads or lithium ion, which we'll talk about in our next video. They're also relatively heavy compared to nikad batteries. They just simply weigh more. So in our next video, we'll be talking about lithium ion batteries, which is kind of the common

0:00All right, as a follow on to the last video where we were talking about a couple of different older types of battery technologies. One of those was nik ads. And those are largely defunct. I don't think you'll see those very often anymore. But I also kind of alluded that nickel metal hydride batteries are also older and they are, but you do still see them. So for example, here, let me show you this is an entle loop battery. That's the brand. See it right there. You can get these off of Amazon or really kind of anywhere.

0:30A lot of people in photography use these. These are rechargeable double a batteries. I use them in my flash gun, my flash all the time. And wow, they're just fantastic. They will recycle the flash very, very quickly. And these do have, even though we mentioned that they do have self discharge in this kind of battery. Really all batteries do. I can have one of these charged and sitting on the shelf for months and still get most of the usefulness out of the energy in this battery.

1:02The statement is a lot of people say you can leave these on the shelf for a year and still have 90% of the battery life on this type of battery. So anyway, again, that was nickel metal hydride which I talked about in our last nugget. I just forgot to mention that particular kind of battery. Okay, so that's why I brought it up here. But now let's talk about new batteries. And with this, these are the kind that are going to be used most of the time in most devices. So this type of battery I just showed you, I would have to put that into a charger and then I could use it in any device that accepted double a batteries lithium ion batteries.

1:39I don't know they don't exist in that kind of a format but most of the time these are going to be integrated into a device like hearing aids, earbuds, headphones, tablets, phone, cell phones, laptop computers, all that kind of stuff. So these are very commonly used in all those lithium ion or lion, I guess if you want to say it, lion, I don't know. Anyway, these came out in the 90s and they're still current and these are the ones that you really want to be using. Some of the advantages for using a lithium ion battery will include that a fact that it has a very high energy density.

2:14Because of that, you can use laptops there that will have very long battery life. There's a lot of other factors that play into this, by the way. But I have a MacBook Pro, I think it's a 2019 or 2020 MacBook Pro. I can fly overseas with that MacBook Pro and not have the battery die. It lasts for hours, partially because of this battery technology, but also because of a little bit of a tangent here but in the MacBook Pros now last several years they used something called an ARM processor, advanced risk machine.

2:52So, I'm not going to spell it. Only three letters and I still must spell it, advanced risk machine. So, risk is reduced instruction set computing. I'm not going to write all that out. Okay, reduced instruction set computing. The basic idea is we'll talk more about this when we discuss processors later on in this course, but they, as the name implies, if you use fewer instructions, it's not all that simple but that 's generally how it works out. They consume an amazingly smaller amount of power compared to other types of processors, like Intel processors. So anyway, the bottom line there is because of these types of processors in conjunction with using lithium ion batteries, we can get an extremely long battery life out of a lot of batteries nowadays.

3:41And by the way, the there's a variance of ARM that's also used in most mobile phones, tablets, stuff like that. They also do have a very low self discharge. So you can charge one of these like a laptop, for example, or tablet, you can charge it to 100% let's say, and then go weeks or even months without using that device and when you turn it on, it still has most of the charge. How much? Well, that varies from device to device. But if it was charged 100% you can use it for a long time after that and still get a pretty good, good a length of time out of that battery.

4:19Also, there's no memory effect, not directly anyway with lithium ion batteries. Remember we talked about that in our last nugget where you know this is your battery you're 100% here is your 0% here. And if you go all the way down to a certain percentage, let's say 40%, before you start to recharge it again, it remembers what you called it to be the bottom. In other words, it says to itself, if you will. If this guy charges the battery when it's got 40% charge left, we'll assume that that's actually 0 and therefore it will not drain to this 0% anymore.

4:51We don't have that memory effect with lithium ion batteries. Also, they have a high cycle rate. We didn't discuss that in our last video, but anything it's rechargeable can only be recharged a certain number of times before it will no longer hold a charge very well or before it dissipates its charge very, very quickly. But lithium ion batteries have a high cycle rate, meaning that you can usually recharge these, possibly 1000 of times without really having a significantly detrimental effect on the cycle rate or the overall life of that battery.

5:29Also, they do charge very quickly, relatively speak. Now, let's take a look at some disadvantages. There's not really all that significant, but one of those would be expense. So these kind of batteries are just more expensive to manufacture. So therefore , anything that they're in is also going to be a little bit more expensive because the battery is more expensive. They do have some thermal sensitivity. That's to put it lightly. So when I talk about this, I'm really talking about the fact that they can catch on fire. Okay .

5:59These batteries are by far the best batteries that we've had, at least to this point. However, there is a fire risk. That's why, you know, if you fly much, you'll see the question posed when check in and it'll say, do you have any battery power devices or something like that. In your checked luggage, because there's a concern that it could catch on fire. And when it does, it burns very hot. These batteries do. And they're very difficult to put out the fire because there's contributing energy in that battery.

6:32That's supplementing the energy of that fire or feeding it. So you can imagine if it was in a, the cargo hole of a plane where everyone's checked luggage is if something catches on fire down there. There's lots of fuel down there. There's other bags, there's plastics, other clothing, all kinds of stuff. And nobody might know that it had caught on fire because it's way down there. But if you carry it with you in the cabin, then at least if it were to catch on fire, there's someone there that can see it and hopefully suppress it or something. So what causes this kind of thing, by the way, where they could catch on fire, it could be either physical damage. You know, something might have gotten dropped, or maybe there's a crimp in the battery, or it's got a brake in the sealed housing of that battery or something like that. That could happen. The batteries could just be defective.

7:19Or one of the more common ways also is if they get overcharged. And with this, you just have to make sure that, especially if you buy a third party charger, that it has circuitry built into it. They can detect when a device is properly charged and then it will back off the charging. And then it's just kind of maintenance charging after that. But if it gets overcharged, that can certainly happen. Also, one of the things you can look for is some safety factors for, well, this kind of battery or really any kind of battery.

7:49So if you see a battery that is ruptured in any way or broken or is swollen, sometimes this is a precursor or a harbinger, if you will, to win a battery is about to have a major problem like that. If you see a battery that's a number one, unusually hot, that's a warning sign. Or if it swells, I don't really have anything to show you like that right now, but I'll show you some batteries inside of computers later on. But let's say this is one of the batteries. That's actually my little credit card holder for my phone. But anyway, if you see it start to swell, you know, like right now you notice that right across here it's completely flat.

8:24You'll see it start to bow or bulge out. And I've seen this before. That again is also a sign that that battery might not be safe, should be safely disposed of. I think I actually give this to us that here in a moment anyway. There's also calendar aging. So this just means that the capacity is going to degrade over time, even if you're not using that battery. But again, that's not that really big of an issue in my opinion that's just kind of one of the points that people make about this sometimes. The reason why it's not that big of an issue in my opinion is because how long do we keep devices.

9:00I've got an iPad I think I've had it for five years the battery is still great. Really have no issues with it I'm probably going to trade it in or sell it or something like that and buy a new one before long anyway. Same with phones. How long do we keep our phones. Most people will keep their phones two years maybe three. Very likely that lithium ion battery is going to be well within its lifetime for that two or three year lifetime that you keep that phone. So calendar aging may not be all that significant of an issue now mentioned earlier protection circuitry you do want to make sure that whatever you charge it with it either the manufacturer's original charger.

9:41Or that you buy a charging device that has internal circuitry that can protect that device so that it does not overcharge. Sometimes by the way that protection circuitry is found either in the charger itself or very often also could be in the device itself. So for my MacBook Pro I use a third party charger for it I don't use the apple one because the apple one's too big and bulky. On Amazon I got one for I think was $19 it's about half the size half the weight.

10:11It's got extra USB ports on it and it fully charges my MacBook Pro but the circuitry to prevent overcharging is actually inside of the MacBook not inside of that charger. And by the way speaking of MacBooks there's also something called optimized charging without getting to all details there. You know what actually I'm going to go get my MacBook and I'll show it to you. Okay, I'll show you something about that optimized charging so you can kind of put eyeballs. Okay, so here I'm just making a remote connection to my MacBook Pro I just I'm trying to learn another language so I've still got the dual lingo running you only get rid of that thing and go to the settings.

10:48Okay so actually a couple of ways we could do this get rid of some other noise here as well. The professional trainer would have cleaned all this up before started recording but you didn't get a professional trainer you got me. So anyway notice the charging up here I had it at a coffee shop earlier and I just now brought it in it was in my motorcycles storage saddle bag so anyway I just brought it in and plugged it in you can see there there's a little lightning bolt on it so it's charging. But if we click on that we'll see that it's at 58% and look at this it's kind of fuzzy because of resolution issues but it says it's going to be an hour and 14 minutes until fully charged.

11:27Very often these can also defer a full charge based upon your habits. So it will notice what time you generally plug it in and this is something that I don 't know all the intelligence that Apple uses for this. But it identifies your habits when you usually plug it in you know maybe plug it in before you get a bed at night and it can kind of identify that that's a good time to charge it. This would look like it's just going to continue to charge until it's fully charged although I don't think it's charging it 100% of its ability because an hour and 14 minutes is longer than I think it would normally take for it to get to that status of 100% from this stage.

12:06So anyway, here it also identifies my battery health. It says it's normal so that's good. I've had this laptop. I think four years now and it's still running along just great I used every day. I could choose to use low power mode. I'm not great environmentally friendly apparently but that's set to never right now. Just because I have to have it always at full power for some of the things that I'm doing. It shows the battery level over time. Notice that it knows also what hours it was being charged at.

12:38Okay so it's being charged. It doesn't go to the previous day there but from three to nine o'clock in the morning. Apparently I took it off the charger around nine o'clock this morning. Huh. Seems like I must have overslept or something. Anyway, I was at the coffee shop you saw a diminished a little bit of its charge clear up until now where it is again currently charging. You can also identify the last 10 days and how I've been using it over the last several days. Part of the reason why it also identifies screen on usage here is because that's one of the most energy draining things that your laptop will have.

13:15Everything consumes power the main board logic board if you want to call it that in the Mac ecosystem it's usually called the main board or more currently it's called usually the logic board on PC's we call it a motherboard but anyway those things will all take power because of the RAM that's connected to it the CPU that's connected to it graphics cards stuff like that but to power the monitor that's on there. That takes a lot of battery power requires a lot of juice that's why this is kind of monitored there. Other things we can do here as well as we can slightly dim the display when we're running on battery because again the display consumes a lot of juice.

13:54We can choose to prevent automatic sleeping when it's plugged in to the power adapter and the display is off we can wake for network access so that even if the computer is sleeping it can still be woken up with certain what we call a magic packet actually but it doesn't have to just be that type of a packet that's very often used to wake up network equipment and things like this servers things like that but with this it could be really any kind of incoming network traffic such as iCloud update so this means that this laptop could be asleep so to speak we can still get updates even though it's asleep. You can also zoomed out too fast but anyway you can also optimize video streaming while on battery and I usually don't do that but anyway those are some of the things we have with our batteries here.

14:43And then similarly I have a Lenovo laptop here this of course would be a Windows 11 computer and let me show you some details here about the battery on this one saw in a way so we move out of there. Here is I click on the taskbar area where the battery is, you can see there's a battery charging symbol right there. I click on that. So just shows us on the PC site PC side of things I can't talk today. Also what the battery has been doing lately now I just got this particular laptop it's been completely installed fresh and everything like that so there's not much to see here probably.

15:18But you see again that there's some things that can be done to extend the life of the battery. So battery saver says extend battery life by limiting some notifications and background activity at 20% but we can change that to some other percentage if we want to as well. We also lower screen brightness when we're on battery saver we can get a better view of our battery usage over time for example over the last day, last seven days which there won't be again an awful lot to see because I just got this I think a couple of days ago.

15:48And we can even see what kinds of things are consuming the most battery power with different applications for example that might be consuming that power so just another way to monitor and see what's going on with your battery consumption.

0:00All right, now here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a part of a couple of different machines. These are just ones that I happen to have. And this first one that we're gonna look at here is a really old MacBook Pro. Can you remember what year? I think it was 2012 or something, so it's quite old . But the reason why I'm showing it to you is because there are some differences now with what is going on between MacBook Pros of this era compared to the newer ones. But you will still run into these, okay? So this is a MacBook Pro that I had that I gave it to a friend of mine and her husband spilled a glass of milk on it and ruined it, okay?

0:36So they're not married anymore. I don't know if it's because of this spilled milk or whatever it is. But anyway, I already took the screws off, okay, and full disclosure, I didn't take the screws off. I lost them all. And so now I'm just gonna take it apart. And this is gonna be kind of a little bit more traditional look at what my go on inside of a computer, okay? First of all, it's all dusty and everything. Who knows? There's probably dried milk in there somewhere. Two different things we can do about that. One of those would be, if you're properly grounded, you can use a little vacuum like this, okay?

1:09This has, actually, this is a blower. But some of them will allow you to have an attachment to use on the opposite side of this. Let me turn it off. It won't turn off. There it goes. So that you can use it as a vacuum or as a blower. I'm just using this one as a blower right now. But it's actually pretty high velocity. And I'm gonna use it to kind of clear out some of the dust here. That's always a good practice whenever you open up a case. Okay.

1:50So I blew off some of the old dust that was in there and stuff. It's not much of a factor with this computer because it's already blown anyway. It's already ruined. But what have we got? First of all, we've been talking about batteries and here is a battery. Now, this did have a couple of screws. Actually, there were three screws that would hold this into place. The first screw would have been right here. See that or not? Right about there. The next one would have been right about here, okay?

2:20And then there's another one right here on the far end right over there. Okay. So once those screws are taken out, then you can remove the battery. There is also a connector that connects to the logic board. I'm gonna pull that out and you can see there. It's just a little kind of a, it's not really a technically ribbon connector, I wouldn't say, but I guess you could call it that. And it has various pins in it that you used to connect it to the logic board. So if I recall correctly, I already replaced this battery once and it already kind of bailed and everything.

2:53And so this was actually a replacement battery and it's a third party battery. This says on here, it's kind of hard to see. So I'll just read it to you. It says lithium ion. Okay. So it's a lithium ion polymer battery. And this is how we very often used to be able to work on MacBook Pros. You could replace your own battery and you can't do that anymore. I'll show you that here coming up. Now in the interest of efficiency, since I've got this case open, I'm going to address some of the other things as well involved in this.

3:24And for that, I'm actually just going to come back over here and talk to you directly first. In this particular portion of the A plus exam objective, it talks about portable devices, of course. And it does discuss things like RAM, hard disk drive, solid state drives, batteries, wireless cards, sometimes I think there's biometrics in there, cameras, microphones, stuff like that. And he also speakers, actually let me look at the list. It doesn't mention speakers, but it probably should.

3:55It's mentioned in the next domain. But anyway, the point I'm making with all of that is we're going to be covering a lot of those topics later on in more detail. So for example, RAM, I'm not going to tell you all about RAM right now. It's random access memory. It's where your data is going to be when it's live, when you have a file open, it loads into RAM. When you open an application, it loads its executables and associated files into RAM. And the processor interacts with whatever is in that RAM. So that's kind of the short version. Like I said before, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail with that right now, other than to show you our main purpose here, which is to show you where you can identify some of these things on a portable device.

4:34And so with that in mind, oops, I'm on the wrong screen. That's actually the exam objectives right there. But we'll go back over here. Okay. So what have we got? This is the hard drive. This is literally a hard drive. Most laptops these days, most modern devices don't use hard drives anymore. For the most part, they're going to be using solid state drives. And in particular, probably NVMe solid state drives that are using what we call an M2 form factor. I'll talk about all of that again at a future point in time.

5:06But what I'm going to do here is just take this hard drive out. So you can see how this is normally done. There's way too small to show you even under magnification. But this is a Phillips head jeweler's screwdriver. Sometimes what you'll see these referred to as for an electronics screwdriver. They're readily available on Amazon, kind of just anywhere, hardware, stores, whatever. Anyway, I'm going to use that. Look, there's some milk residue right there. I hope this hard drive is not lactose intolerant. Anyway, so I'm going to unscrew the screws there.

5:36There's one of them. There's kind of obvious here, really. I can see four screws right on there. And I've taken this drive out before because I upgraded it shortly after I got this years and years ago. Anyway, going to release the third screw there. And then finally the fourth screw. As with many times, with many portable devices, I should say, the screws are extremely tiny. Oh, that one does not want to come out. The milk apparently became like Loctite in there and it really held on to it pretty good.

6:06So anyway, these screws, you can kind of see that one there, I think, right? That's actually a fairly sizable one. Oh, that does have Loctite on. I don't know if you can see that, but there's some blue. You better view there. Might not be visible, but there's some blue Loctite on there, which if you're not familiar with Loctite, it's used in a lot of different things. It's used in auto mechanics, construction, you know, electronics like this, all kinds of things where it's a liquid that you put onto a screw and it kind of holds it into place so it doesn't walk its way out over time.

6:39So vibration or tension or something like that doesn't cause that screw to kind of unwind, if you will. So, okay, that's it. Now I'm just going to take this out. It's got a ribbon connector right here. This is a serial ATA hard drive. I don't know if that's too visible or not. I have to look this way to see if you can see it or not, but that's a serial AT A connector on there. Again, we'll talk about that at a future point in time some more, but it used to be very, very common on laptops, okay, on desktops as well. But anyway, and then it would just connect to this ribbon cable here and then we would have underneath here, which is out of view, there'll be a connector into the logic board where that hard drive would ultimately be making its interface.

7:20So this is a, what is it, a one terabyte hard drive, which is actually pretty large for the age of this computer. This is back when we were getting hard drives that were closer to 512 megabytes . So pretty sizable. But by today's standards, this type of drive, very slow. That's why we don't really see them in modern computers anymore, desktops or laptop computers. Hard drives still have their place. They're very often used for archival storage, for example, but most modern devices, we don't use those anymore.

7:56Okay, what else have we got? Oh, this is a CD DVD drive. It's a little bit more involved to take out, but I could take that out as well. Although once again, that's another thing you don't ever see in modern computers, because nobody's using CDs or DVDs anymore. Another thing we see here are a couple of fans. We can see that there's milk right there on this fan right here. Oh, and it looks like right here. I'm not sure that I'm accurate on this, but right here, it looks like there was a little bit of an arc or something in there.

8:27It must have happened when the milk has spilled in there. But the next thing I really want to point out is this right here. This is memory or RAM, really. This is something called a small outline dual inline module memory module, small outline dual inline memory module or a so dim. I pull these tab connectors to the side up, like to the side, and it pops open. And then now this can pull out like this.

8:58And there's actually two dims, so dims in there. There's a, it's the kind of double stacked key wheel. There's this one that was on top, and then the one that was on the bottom there . Well, sure how many that is. Two gigabytes, okay. So there's two gigabytes on this one, and then there's two gigabytes on this one. So total of four gigabytes. Anyway, once again, as you'll see later on, on modern modern MacBooks, modern MacBooks, these are now integrated into the mainboard, into the logic board. So you can't just swap out memory on a laptop like this.

9:32If I decided four gigabytes wasn't enough, I can put two four gigabyte ones in, and I'd have eight or two eight gigabytes in, and then I'd have 16 or something like this. So I'm just going to go ahead and put these back right now. Notice that they are, they do have a offset slot right here, so that you can only put it in one way. You can't put it in backwards or sideways or upside down or whatever. If that could happen, I probably would do it. Anyway, go ahead and press that down. Again, with this one, stick it into the slot, press it in, and press it down, and it is now locked in the place.

10:07Here on this side, we see two cooling fans. Outside of our view here, probably underneath the other side of this logic board, is going to be the processor. It's also going to have the graphics card. Those do produce quite a bit of heat. And so these fans, I'm sure, are going to be cooling those components. But anyway, this is one of the older types. I'm going to go ahead and put this back together, and then I'll move on to one of the other types of laptops. So I'm just going to go ahead and finger tighten these.

10:37You don't have to get a torque wrench out or something like that, or be too scientific with it. Generally speaking, just finger tip tight. Just twist this until it's just finger tip tight. You don't want to really crank it down because these are small screws. Sometimes they will go into aluminum, or sometimes they'll even go into plastic . And if you over torque them, then it can strip out that screw, at least the screw socket where it goes in. All right, screw in that last one in, and we'll put the case cover back on.

11:08Here we go. And if I had any screws remaining, I would screw it in here. One thing I'll point out also while we're here is that, notice these feet that are on here? Sometimes those rubber feet that are here will fall off, and there's an adhesive usually that will keep them in place on the case. Some laptops will actually have a retaining screw underneath these feet. So in order to get to the screw, you have to pry these off of there, which I don't really like to do, because as you may be aware, once you release the adhesive on the other side of that, it's never as good anymore.

11:46And a lot of times it will not stick on there anymore. Oh, you know what I just realized? I never put the battery back in. See how good I am at A+ stuff, people? Let me show you another thing I've got here. This is a suction cup, and this one's not too hard. I could take it off my hand anyway, but this is actually a phone holder. As you can see, this is where the phone would go. This is what I just didn't use this in my car, but it's got a little locking mechanism here, which gives me really good suction on that suction cup. So some devices, you'll need to use a suction cup to pull off, and voila, that comes off quite nicely there.

12:16So let me just put this battery back in. And you put that back into that little ribbon connector. There would normally be screws, but I don't have any in this particular case, because again, it's kind of just an old, just fun to computer anyway. All right, now let's move on to a more modern MacBook. This is a model A2141. You can Google that if you want, but that is a 16-inch MacBook Pro 2019 model. Okay, so it's a few years old right now.

12:47Now this again is going to use a bunch of really tiny screws. Also, these are even smaller than the other screws I showed you. For sake of reference, maybe you can see it right there in the palm of my hand. Look how small that is. Those are so easy to lose, and yes, I've lost lots of them. I even ordered it on Amazon a spare set of these screws, because they just kind of go everywhere. Also, these don't use Phillips-head screws. These use what we call a Pentelobe. Pentel, as the name implies, Pentel meaning 5, it uses five points.

13:19That's not the same as Torx. Torx, we use six points in that kind of a star bit. Okay, this, we use 5, so you don't want to try to use a Torx on this. It's a special kind of a screwdriver that you will have to get. I happen to have one here, and that's what I would use to pull all the screws out. I did that all that in advance. But anyway, the two in the back here, right here on left and right, these two are a little bit longer. And those are where the exhaust is, where the fans blow the exhaust out.

13:54They're a little bit longer. Let me just put these up in comparison. There's a short one, a short one there, and a longer one. So the longer ones go in the back, the short ones are going to cover the rest of the screw holes there. Okay, so now this one's kind of a trick. So once you unscrew all of the screws, then you don't want to pull this up and bend it back. Okay, you don't want to bend it back this direction. Okay, it kind of looks like you should, but you shouldn't. That will bend the metal.

14:25What you do is you pull downwards this direction, like towards where I am. Okay, so I'm going to pull and it feels a little bit like you're doing it wrong , because there's some tension on there and just pull towards yourself. Sometimes it helps if you kind of pick it up like this. Oh, there we go. I don't know if you heard that kind of pop, but it came loose. I always feel like I'm about to break something, but that is how you do it. Anyway, now look at this thing. First of all, since we've been talking about batteries primarily, where is the battery on this thing?

14:55Well, it's considered a single battery, but it actually uses six different battery packs all connected in series on these MacBook Pros. Here's one, two, three, four, five, six. It uses six different battery packs, which are in their buy adhesive. They're not considered user serviceable. A Mac, or excuse me, an Apple service center might be able to replace these, but they're not generally considered user serviceable. Neither is pretty much anything else.

15:26You can replace the touchpad or the touch screen sensor thing. There's a way to get to that and remove that. You can replace these fans if one of those were to go out, but the RAM, you're not going to replace that or upgrade it. It's kind of baked into the logic board. Same is true of the processor. So that's just kind of how Apple does it now. And this just kind of helps to guarantee, at least for Apple, that people will buy more when they first buy the laptop.

15:59At least that's my philosophy on it. Because if I see a laptop now that has 32 gigs of RAM, let's say, but I think, oh, you know, it's probably enough for now, but what if I need 64 in the future? Well, you can't replace the memory modules. They're not user serviceable. It's kind of soldered, if you will, into the logic board. So I have to buy one now that is as upgradable, as upgraded, as I think it might ever possibly need at any point in the future.

16:29So it kind of forces you sometimes to overbuy possibly. Same is true of the main storage. So again, there's no hard drive in here. It's solid state storage, but it's all, again, soldered and integrated into the logic board. There's nothing I can do to upgrade that. So anyway, that's it. I mean, these are great laptops. I really love these MacBook Pros, but not a lot of serviceable components in them. Most TC based laptops are much more serviceable, which I'll show next.

17:01Actually, I'll save that for the next video, because I've probably gone a little bit too long on this one. So I'll save that one for the next video, and we'll see what the components are in a more modern, PC based laptop.

0:00All right, so now what I'm gonna do is go ahead and work on a PC based laptop This one's old Lenovo. It's a good machine really. It's even though it's I think five years old or so right now They were produced in oh 2019 and 2020 the specific model you can see it says property of CBT nuggets We have a pile of laptops and other devices like that. I just had them send me a pile of stuff I didn't tell them I was gonna take it apart and possibly destroy it, but hey They'll find out eventually right might be my last day on the job. Okay, so with this one I like it a lot because it's in some ways easier than taking apart the MacBooks Okay, the MacBooks have those tiny little screws are so easy to lose here We still have tiny little screws, but they're Phillips said you don't have to have a really weird, you know What I call a pentagram. No, not a pentagram The MacBooks are the anti-Christ of laptops what's it called?

0:55Pentelobe excuse me the pentelobe screwdrivers. This is just a small Phillips head screwdriver right here, and I'm just gonna unscrew all of these screws here. These are also captive screws, so I really like that So you can't lose it really okay, so I'm gonna unscrew each one of these I think there's one two three five or six of these you don't have to memorize that because you know each laptop's different Some will have I don't know five some will have seven or eight maybe something like that So anyway, I'm just unscrewing all of these Once you do that you may also need a Spudger you know, I'll show you that that's this kind of thing this one's actually I use that for cars actually We can use that for card trim and stuff like that, but it's same idea A lot of spudgers will have a hook on one end so that you can use it to move cables around inside of the case But they're plastic non-conductive So you don't want to have something metal for example touching other metal parts inside of the computer case Or electronic components, but it's usually thin on on at least one end if not both ends so you can use the pry in between plastic separators and parts and and separate tabs and stuff like that hopefully without damaging it sometimes it happens anyway because Well plastic can be brittle sometimes anyway

2:13If you don't have a spudger Which very often comes in electronic Repair kits and things like this again that you can order off of Amazon or something like that You can also use other things. I've seen people use credit cards. I've seen people use a guitar picks So it's kind of like whatever's handy. That's thin plastic non-conductive. You know go ahead and use it Anyway, I don't think I'm gonna need it in this case because did I do that one already? Yeah, because This should come off fairly easily. Let me show you another tip as well. This is a I can't remember my show you this already This is a actually a phone holder that I for my car, which I really never wound up using it I found it in a drawer never wound up using it for my phone But it does have a suction cup on it which sometimes that's handy as well So I'm gonna apply the suction cup right there and then that allows me to potentially Lift this cover off a little bit easier if I'm having any struggles with it.

3:11You know, I just realized I forgot There's a screw right in the middle. So I better do that one as well. Oh my goodness Can't walk and shoot them at the same time. That's kind of an old person saying that what it is. Okay, so now I Can put the suction cup on there and this helps it to just come off of there a little bit easier sometimes So again each Each laptop can be different, but in this case it might be helpful So let's take a look at what we've got going on inside of here and also again I could use our handy little dust blower here Wow, this is actually this thing's actually pretty powerful if I had hair I would show you how it could be on both of my hair As it is I could just shoot it in this year and it would come out this year.

4:10But anyhow What we got going on here? What can we replace? Okay, let's just kind of take the grand tour of what we've got in this particular laptop This is not entirely unique to Lenovo other PC based laptops will have a similar structure, but they're not all exactly the same So for example starting on the edge. This is a speaker. Okay. There's a wire here that goes across you can see down here Usually that's hooked into the battery a little bit better. It kind of must have come loose or something there Anyway, there's some tabs on the battery that help guide that particular wire Here is the other end along in the way and the other way Here's the other speaker on this side over here And you can also see that there are a few other things going on here like rubber bumpers There's some orange rubber bumpers right here. I'm assuming that's for Helping with shock and stuff like that Okay This whole thing right here is the battery It's a lithium ion battery. It says right there rechargeable lithium ion battery and I would expect that That's mostly what everybody's using nowadays and another thing to keep in mind is that If you it is serviceable you can replace this battery you can take it out and

5:26Put in a different battery But you should put in the same branded Little an oval battery. Okay, of course Lenovo recommends that I guess they want you to buy their batteries But it's also a good reason for that because One of the reasons why a lot of batteries blow up is poor quality control and that's why they may catch on fire So Lenovo wants to ensure that Quality batteries go back in that are under their their QC their quality control All right. Now how would I remove this battery? Okay. There are a few screws.

5:58There's one right here I think there's four yeah four total So again, it's just a phillips head screwdriver. Now. These are not captive So I'll put those in my little magnetic tray over here That went out take this one out by the way, uh, you may notice I'm wearing black gloves here Some people like to wear gloves when they work on this kind of stuff Uh, it might give them a little better grip Uh, you don't have to be as concerned about oh, you know if I you got hand lot ion on your hands or something like that or Or oils in your in your fingertips and stuff like that some electronics might be sensitive to that Nothing we're really going to be doing is going to be affected by that Right now, but nevertheless, I've got them on and Hold us closer the other reason why I'm wearing them is because Frankly, I need a manicure. Okay A manne in a petty Uh, but no, I've been I've been working on motorcycles and uh My hands can look better. So anyway, we're taking all this stuff out. You can go screws out And then there's another thing we have here. This is this is actually an ins ulating um piece of tape I guess you can call it and Uh, it's designed to protect the connector here. So if I take that off right now I actually want to tell you something before I take that up. Um, I forgot to mention this earlier In the bios On this computer, which I accessed by turning on the power and pressing f1

7:17I turned off The battery power For this battery. So in other words, this battery is not being used to charge Or to power this laptop right now Uh, it will reset and again start to use this battery as soon as I plug in this power cable Into the computer will automatically reset itself to again use the battery, but it was important to Uh, you know kind of disconnected at least in bios so that I wouldn't run into any electrical complications with this, right?

7:48So anyway, I can remove this piece of little tape. It's against called in some kind of an insulator Let me get my spudger and we get a lit get a lit Uh, we get a lift on that and then you can see down right here This is where the battery actually makes a connection to the motherboard Uh, this can just lift straight up actually, but it so it feels a little bit weird because It's kind of firm in there and there's not really a um Lever or anything like that to remove it. You just got to lift it straight up and boy It feels a little bit weird to do this feel like you're gonna break something Remember when I said that I might destroy this before I send it back to CBT n uggets?

8:30Well, there we go. Finally. So that came up. I again. I used my spudger tool to uh to assist with that and What else I guess that's it so now I can lift this battery out. I've taken all the screws out And I'm kind of also guiding off this this little uh wire that connects these two speakers on the side Notice that there are also some rubber foam pieces that are adhesively stuck onto this as well He came from the factory that way. Uh that will help with a number of things shock um Vibration so that this does not rub against the case Remember you don't want to damage the uh, the the The battery in any way because if it we can start to leak you could again catch on fire All that sort of stuff. So we want to avoid that. But anyway, if I bought a new one I remember if this was no longer useful and I bought a different one Uh, I would just have to remember to put these back on there in their relatively the same locations There are also these tabs. I hope you can see those. Yeah, there are some tabs right there. That's where the uh wire here for the speaker connections would connect to that and also It also has a place in here where it connects to the case. Okay, so well, we can see it but right about here

9:47There's there's another tab location there a couple of tab locations there that this can kind of rest into To make that connection. So anyway, that's what I would do if I needed to replace the battery simple enough Um other things I could release Uh removal on here. I could remove these speakers if I needed to Um, I don't know if you could see that but the little bumper there is in a little Little gap right there and it uh again helps to protect against shock and make it seat better into that This goes on these pegs that are over here I can get it on straight. I'll put that on There we go put that on And also I still need to uh route this Cable along the battery as well. I probably should have done that before I put these speakers back But anyway Because these my spudged tool to do that again as well. So I'm kind of snapping down this battery Onto the The tabs it's actually helps if I tilt it And go in this way. You might be able to hear it kind of clicking into place there There we go. Okay, so that looks pretty good Again, I'm gonna just route this using my little spudger I don't know if that's even an official term. That's just what we call it Maybe it's kind of slang for Eaky people All right, making it happen here. All right. I'm willing to consider that good

11:02enough. Okay. So once that's been done And let's say I just replaced this battery. I would just take this Connector once again and place it back down into its original location again You just got to snap it into place feels a little bit like you're gonna break it There we go. So that goes into place there with this little insulating piece back over it I don't know if this would really even make a difference if I forgot that or didn't put it back on But since that's how it came from the manufacturer I'll kind of honor their method. There we go. Okay, so that's one thing who could be replaced now. What else?

11:34Let's go over here. What is this thing right here? That is my Wi-Fi card. Okay, now You can probably see here. Let me see if I can move this closer. There's a couple of leads right there Those actually go to the antenna and I don't really honestly know where they go entirely But a lot of times they will go into the lid The lid of the monitor and then that circumference of the monitor Becomes kind of a big antenna. So that's a lot of times where those would go All right. Anyway to replace that it would be very similar to what I would do with some other things I would just unscrew the one screw that's on here and again Some laptops may have this integrated directly into the motherboard and you won 't be able to replace it many of them though I think you probably will be able to Set that screw aside as well And then all we'd have to do here is to pull this out. Okay out of this little socket You can get a little bit of a grip on this and pull it out this way And now you can kind of see That it's notched so you can only put it in one way you can't put it in No upside down backwards or sideways or something like that And if I needed to replace it, I would simply just do that. Okay, so then I'll just put it back I'll press it back into the location where I removed it from

12:52Okay And then put the screw back in and that's pretty much it. So that's pretty easily replaceable Part this this Wi-Fi adapter. It's integrated That's really not integrated in the motherboard, but that's attached to A specific slot on the motherboard. Okay, so let's screw that back in again all of these screws that we use for All these components that we're doing here and including in case finger tip type, you know, you don't need to you know Hand tighten it real quick. You're likely to strip something out remember a lot of this Actually threads into plastic as well So very easy to strip some of this out. Okay, what else we got? So let's go back to batteries This right here is a battery. I'm gonna put it somewhere on this page that you 're looking at Look look for this if you want but there's a discussion about coin batteries.

13:44This is a coin battery That's under here. It's underneath this little plastic Looks like almost shrink wrap, but anyway, it's not that but it's this black thing Uh, this is a 2016 I think so 20 means 20 millimeters in diameter so from So from here to here and then it's a 1.6 millimeters in thickness Another one that's very common but more common on desktop computers would be a 2032 So i'll be 20 millimeters across and 3.2 millimeters in thickness. Okay, and there's a few others as well They're the same kind of coin batteries are used for Broad's door openers and all kind of other stuff. Okay. What else could we replace here?

14:30Uh, let's take a look here at these fans these fans can also be replaced So if there's been a problem with them you can do that uh this right here this little winding Kind of thing that we see right here Uh, this is a cooling System that's used to help cool things like the graphics card and the CPU We don't have the CPU and view from where we are right here We'd have to be on the other side of the motherboard to see that and it's not really user serviceable Anyway in most cases at least not easily all right Other things we could do uh, so we've got memory Grabbing the wrong thing. Okay, we've got memory here Except there is no memory there. Okay. Uh, I could put another memory module in here a so dim in that one Remember a so dim is a single outline dual inline memory module so dim And uh, that's also what my teachers called me in grade school. So dim anyway, uh, this is uh, this is Uh, the memory module that we have in this computer Uh, if it's not enough, I can't remember how big this one is, but if it's not enough I could easily just add another one over here. You do have to match this but the specs exactly the same speed Helps if they're the same manufacturer everything. Okay, because otherwise you

15:45can run into some problems with that But that's a fuller discussion. We'll discuss more when we talk specifically about ram in the future Anyway, to release this I just push these tabs and I think you saw me do that on maybe that other macbook Uh, very very similar to that, but just release those and now here it is Okay, you can see again It's got offset an offset tab or a notch there in the middle And uh, that prevents me from installing it and properly how big is this one? I haven't even run look 16 gigabytes just not very big Um, I don't even buy any laptops anymore unless they're at least 32 But if I wanted to buy another 16 gigabyte one, I could put it in this empty slot right over here And then we would have plenty of room Uh plenty of memory now the only is You can't always just decide to put this wherever you want to I can't just say well I think I'll put it over here this time just for fun Uh normally and this is true of most motherboards. There's a specific Order of memory slots That you have to populate it in okay. We can't just randomly choose something Okay, a lot of that has to do with there there are certain pairs that have to be honored But we'll get to that later on when we talk more about memory. Okay, so to put this back in you simply press

17:01Press down into it and then press down on top of this and the the notches that we're on the side Automatically go back into place and we're done way then something like this Next thing we could replace here would be this right here. This is my main storage So remember in that macbook pro I took apart in the last nugget Uh, it had a physical hard drive Uh spinning platters in it so that's a smaller form factor a two and a half inch drive But spinning platters are slow Um and not only that but they're also slow. Okay. They're also heavier by the This is substantially faster and much lighter That's a big selling point with laptops every laptop manufacturer want the brag about how light their laptops are how easy they are to just throw in the backpack and Order out like a frisbee or something. I don't know. Anyway, so i'm going to take this out Uh, we'll talk more in a fuller discussion about this kind of memory This is uh an m2 form factor m.2 And the kind of memory it is as s s s s s d solid state drive And it's a specific kind known as nvme which is very very fast

18:16So i'm going to unscrew this little screw right here that which just retains it into into its place Pull that out and then this again is very similar to the ram Uh, you can just kind of pull it out of the slot This direction As you can see here Once again, it's not in just a such a certain way that I cannot install it improperly Uh, how big is this? What say on there? Gotta say on here somewhere. Let me get my old man magnifying glass out here Oh, there it is Five it's right next to that QR code 512 gigabytes. You can probably see that 500 and 12 gigabytes That's not very big uh by modern standards Um, once again I wouldn't buy any laptop with less than a gig with it less than a terabyte In it, okay So but again, this is a five-year-old laptop. So all right. Anyway, i'll go and put that back in Notice that we do have a slot For an additional one if we wanted right here under this yellow tape So if I wanted to put a different new one in I could just pull this back And then I would install it there sometimes this may be adhesive. I don't know.

19:20I guess I can touch it That's it's a little tacky um and sometimes these will uh rest on a kind of a tacky surface not a full You know like really strong tape but something like a tacky surface like that or Sometimes it'll be on some kind of a cushioned Cushion surface as well. All right. Let me go ahead and put the screw back in It's hard to see a black screw on black gloves. Where is it? All right, and then i'll put this uh screw back in to retain this Storage when in place. All right. So that's pretty much it for most of the field replaceable parts that we have here. I'm going to put the screws back in for the uh for the battery. Oh, I should point something out as well. I don't know if you can see that Let me get a couple of these screws out So yeah, oops. I just dropped one. I hate it when I do that. Where'd it go?

20:13Ah Oh, here it is All right there A magnetic screwdriver. There we go. Okay. So What I wanted to point out was these are actually slightly different in size I don't know if you can see that but one is a little bit longer than the other one and You wouldn't really know If you didn't keep track of it, which one went into which one of these holes uh most uh laptops these days you can't go to the support pages and get like a service manual for the laptop I actually looked that up Uh because I wasn't sure which one it went in and it tells me that uh, I think these shorter ones are four millimeters And they go on the outside Like there and there and these two inside ones are six millimeter screws So there's are the longer ones and that's where they go Right. So you do want to make sure that you don't do that incorrectly because especially in Really tight spaces like what you see in a laptop If you put a screw in that's too long It could poke through and damage something on the other side of this motherboard So you gotta not be too haphazard with that. Don't ask me how I know about that . Okay. All right put it in the last screw right here

21:28That's pretty much it for that part of things. Next thing I need to do is just replace the The case the the back case for this particular laptop I don't know if you can see it probably can there are tabs here So those have to be placed into the case here Those kind of set it into place properly And then I try to lay it down evenly And make sure that the screw holes are all lined up that there's no one usual gaps or bulges Um, you know, the bulge might mean that I actually left something in there The uh a tool or something like that Or it could mean that it's not lined up properly or that something it's inside of there is not installed properly Uh, and then the next thing I do this is true of lots of different kinds of things in mechanics And with this sort of thing as well Is you want to do as much as you can have like a star pattern?

22:21Okay, you don't want to tighten them all just tighten this one and tighten this one then tighten this one Uh, it just lines up a little bit better and it torques a little bit better if you can Screw these down In a kind of a diagonal or star shaped pattern So I started at this upper left corner So the closest I can get to the lower right would be probably this one over here There's not one really clear down here. So let's go to this one and that's pretty good there Screwing that down again fingertip tight doesn't have to be super tight Uh, I don't know if you saw but a lot of these screws will have a Loctite on them It's tiny a little bit of blue a Loctite Let me go to this diagonal this time. I guess and so I don't know if you can hear that But you can also hear some tabs Setting into place when I'd screwed that down Down here now. I guess right that's good. And one right here in the middle All right, that's in place and then this one and then after that, I think I have one more One more right here. There we go. All right And uh, that's it. So this laptop would now be ready to be put back in the service Like I said, I need to plug the power in which will auto also automatically Reset the bios so that it can recognize the battery again

23:36And then it should boot up just fine And now you can see I have successfully turned on this computer We get a little desktop going right here So we do have success in properly booting up this computer after we put it back together by some miracle I did not destroy this laptop