Guide to disassembling the G53JW and installing second hard drive

Hi guys, so I thought I'd post a few pics of dis-assembly to access the hard drive bays, RAM, and wireless since its a bit more complicated that your average laptop. A few of these things was pure guessing and trial and error for me so hopefully this saves you some time. This also shows how I installed a SSD without a bracket.

Tools needed: Regular size flathead screwdriver and a MINI phillips screwdriver. Mini ones are the type you'd use to open a watch. You'll find it at the hardware section of any store.

You can click any image below for a bigger version.

1. Unplug the laptop and remove the battery

2. Open it up and use your flathead screwdriver to lightly put some pressure in the 4 small slots on the top of the keyboard til they come loose:


3. Once you get a couple of them removed gently lift the keyboard on one side as you do the last two and the keyboard will pop out:


4. Do not pull the keyboard straight off. Gently flip it upside down as the cables are still attached. Once upside down you can remove the two ribbon cables. These come out easier if you pop out the little plastic bits that are holding them in. For the big one its the white pieces of plastic that you can slide slightly to the left with your fingernail or screwdriver to loosen the ribbon cable. For the tiny one, its the two tiny bits of black plastic which you slide out to the left as well. See the final steps for closeups of these areas when I re-attach the ribbon cables:


5. If all you are doing is adding an extra DIMM of ram, you are done! No need to unplug keyboard. Flip open the piece of black plastic and you will find an empty dimm slot. This slot should be free on all G53JW's that come with 6GB or less. 8GB ones are probably 4x2 GB and filled already. If you need to get to the other RAM, wireless card, optical drive, or hard drives carry on:


6. Here is with the keyboard removed. You are now going to want to remove the touchpad ribbon cable that you can see at the bottom:


7. The only screw you need to removed here is the one on the bottom right here. Once its remove put your screwdriver in the hole next to the screw hole and with a bit of force pull it to the left. This unlocks the touchpad/palm rest to come off. Note you can see other screws removed near it, this is not needed. That was trial and error on my part:


8. The touchpad is held in place with a few plastic clips but you should be able to get a grip on it on the top side once its unlocked. Pry it off (don't forget to unplug the touchpad ribbon first!) and the whole palmrest with touchpad will come off. Now you need to remove the circled screws to unlock the bottom panel. I'm sure there are a couple screws here that maybe don't need to be removed but nothing else came loose by just removing all these. I recommend lining up the screws on a table in the same order that they came out in so you can easily replace them later as some are smaller than others.


9. Flip the laptop over (recommend putting something soft beneath it like a cloth mousepad or something to avoid any possibility of scratches. The back panel should come off relatively easy. The side you unscrewed should lift off while the other side is clipped in sort of like a battery cover.


10. Here it is with the one hard drive caddy removed and 2 open bays. You can also see the two ram slots available here, wireless card in top left and one of the screws on the right will release the optical drive for removal but I haven't touched the wireless or optical drive yet:


11. Here I am re-installing the hard drives. You'll notice I moved the mechanical drive to the other bay with the bracket and on the right side I have installed a SSD without a bracket. I did this so the SSD would be in SATA port #1. Since the SSD has no moving parts it's a lot safer to use without a bracket. I would not recommend a mechanical drive without a bracket. As you can see by the red circle I put a few layers of cardboard so its a snug fit and doesn't come unplugged or move around:


12. Now I cut out some cardboard of equal thickness (well slightly less thick) than the black foam on top of the other hard drive bracket. This is to further keep the drive secure and prevent it from moving. The bottom panel should keep it in place with pressure alone but I put a small piece of double sided tape between the drive and cardboard so it can't move when I was putting the panel back on. Do this stuff at your own risk of course. One of the many dealers on these boards can do a more pro job of course:


13. Put the back plate back onto the bottom. You will have to apply a bit of force to snap it in. Flip the laptop over again and replace all the screws around the touchpad to secure the bottom panel. You will notice the top middle of the palmrest has some flex even after you've snapped it in... don't worry! It's because you haven't locked it back in place yet. Look again at step 7 and this time slide the lock back to the right and then screw it in again. The palm rest is now secure.

Now you will need to re-attach the ribbons. Put the keyboard upside down on the touchpad like it was when you first removed it. Like I said earlier, you need to slightly pop out some plastic bits to be able to re-insert them. For the big keyboard one its the white plastic piece and for the small keyboard ribbon and the touchpad ribbon its the two little black bits on either side of the place you insert it. Insert the ribbon and push the plastic back in to lock the ribbon in place. See the two below images for closeups:


14. The keyboard snaps back into place very easily. Just apply light pressure to the 4 areas you originally pried it out at until you don't hear any more clicks/snaps.

15. If you installed a second hard drive go into the BIOS under the boot menu and under "Hard drive BBS priorities" switch your new drive to number one then make sure it's in the boot list as seen here with my Intel SSD. I always recommend a clean install in these cases but if you want to clone your old C: drive you can do that but just make sure you delete the old C: system partition or else windows will probably be profoundly confused when you boot up.



The simpler way is to just clean install Windows 7. The driver disk provided by Asus is very simple to use. You simply check everything you want to install and it does them all and auto-reboots and resumes until its done. However since Asus doesn't include a copy of Windows 7 itself, you can get a perfectly legitimate ISO copy of Home Premium 64 bit right from Microsoft. Then just use your CD key from the bottom of your laptop to install it. You can find links to the ISO here: Windows 7 ISO x86 and x64 Official Direct Download Links (Ultimate, Professional and Home Premium) My Digital Life - use the digital river link. Very fast. Make sure its home premium as thats what your cd key is for.

Hope this helps someone!

 

Great guide!
Thanks, I'll be using this once I get my G53.

 

Very useful info. +1 rep.

 

Nice guide! Thanks!

 

Excellent detailed guide...appreciate it. I have subscribed to the thread for future reference once I get my G53. +1

One question...what is the brand of memory installed in your laptop?

 

I forgot to check the factory installed memory, but my model (G53JW-XR1) only came with 4GB so I added a 4GB DIMM to the memory slot under the keyboard (you can see it in step 5) to make it 8GB total. The one I added was a Kingston DDR3-1333 which has Hynix chips on it. All I know about the ones pre-installed is that they were ddr3-1333. This kingston stuff was cheap though and works fine.

 

I agree, excellent and clear guide. Thanks!

 

I hate to pour water on what is an innovative solution, but have you considered the heat generated by the hard drive, and how enclosing it with cardboard might affect not only the cardboard itself, but also the overall heat dissipation from that hard drive?

 

Thankfully the SSD generates almost no heat, which is why I recommended NOT doing this with a mechanical drive which will. SSD's use like 0.5 watts idle and only 1-2 watts under load.

Truth be told even mechanical laptop drives generate such little heat but I would also be concerned about vibrations without the bracket. The other good thing is how isolated the hard drive areas are from the hot components.

But like i said this is all at ones own risk. The main part of the guide is how to open this beast. If i can ever get my hands on a bracket separately i would.

 

Great guide! I was wondering however if you knew how to reach the second sodimm slot on the top of the mobo. If i'm not mistaken it is located beside just to ward the palmrest mirrored to the accessible one. Having some trouble trying to figure out if I have to remove the mobo to access it or if that top metal plate can be removed.

 

You do not have to remove the motherboard to get at the 4th memory slot, but you do have to remove the screen and take the bottom case apart. You will then be able to access the 4th slot from the top of the motherboard.

 

Thanks, this is helpful. I need to get at my DVD drive since it buzzes a bit if the computer vibrates at all. It actually looks like less work than I feared, hopefully I'll get around to it in the next few weeks.

 

Great guide, Thanks for sharing.

 

Thank you for this. I will +1 rep for ya

 

Nice guide, +rep for the effort.

 

Awesome guide, thank you. I had mine apart and back together in around 45 min. I threw in my SSD drive, swapped out the drive for my sony bluray burner, and changed out the wireless.

Question for those that own this laptop. I didn't look at the model ram inside, can anyone point me to another 2gb dimm that will work with the others so I can go to 8gb?

For those wondering, I bought the "Amazon" edition and it came with 6gb of DDR3 1333mhz ram.

 

How many days did it take to arrive at your house after you bought it (i.e. hit the checkout button, submitted payment, etc through amazon)?

 

Awesome guide!

I'm a bit hesitant to put cardboard to hold the SDD. Not because I think there'll be any problems, but I think I'd rather try to find a more "pro-looking" solution. But thumbs up for your post!

On this note, does anybody know when the official Asus brackets will be on available in Canada?

Also, does anybody know what type of RAM is in the A1? I know it has 1333 DDR3. I'm thinking of putting a 4th SODIMM in, but I want it to match what's in there already. Any ideas as to the specific brand they used and timings?

 

Probably close to 20. I was a pre-order. After it shipped took 1 day b/c I have amazon prime and ordered it overnight for $3.99 shipping. They still have some in stock.

 

Thank you for the guide. 2 corrections. In pic 7 you do have to remove the screw above the "slider" screw. In pic 8 you do not need to remove the 2 screws on either side of the touchpad ribbon channel.

 

Thanks a lot for the awesome guide! Just wanted to know which kingston 4gb ram stick did u get? All I could find for ddr3-1333 is their "ValueRAM ((KVR1333D3S9/4G)" which I read somewhere is Elpida and not Hynix.

Or does anyone have any suggests for what ram sticks would work?

Thank you!

 

Try running SiSoft sandra or something to report the hardware info. I would do it on mine but my wife managed to get a virus on mine within a day of me owning it so I haven't been messing with it much. If I get it cleaned up this afternoon I'll report back what modules mine has.

 

That's the stuff exactly. You can see right in pic #5 its hynix... however mine is green PCB but googling i see others are blue PCB with the elpida chips so they must have both. I got mine from NCIX.

The other chips that came with the laptop are 2GB Asint DDR3-1333 with the same timings as the kingston stuff.

 

Thanks Rancid, the program seems very useful and downloading it now. I hope you got your comp cleaned with relative ease!

Thanks Bendok, I luckily live near a NCIX store so I'll stop by there soon

 

The memory used on most of G53JWs circuating right now is ASint SSZ3128M8-EDJED.

Mine runs constantly at 710mhz x 2 = 1420mhz for some reason. Is anyone else having the same??

 

Hello. I don't understand how to remove the touchpad panel. I removed keyboard, in step 7 i removed screw in bottom right corner and slide next hole at left, but my touchpad is still locked. In step 8 you say that the touchpad is held in place with a few plastic clips, but i can't find it. Where are they? Where i need to push? Can anybody give me a picture where is shown how exactly remove the touchpad.

 

So, can anybody help me with my question?

 

Just make sure you have removed the screw to the right of the slider, and the slider is all the way to the left. Then pry the palm rest up using your fingernail or small screwdriver (carefully ) from just above the touchpad (that is the edge that is closest to the screen). It doesn't just lift off, you have to pry it.

 

How understand that the slider is in all the way to the left or not?
And, can anybody give me a photo of underside of the palm rest?

 

This is such a great guide, I'm getting my G53JW in a week and this will be very helpful. Thanks!

 

You do need to remove the screw above the bottom right screw at #7 to unlock the back panel. Otherwise, the back panel will not come off.

 

Wow awesome tutorial! Good job bendok!!

I do have a question though...so prior to doing all this i know i need to burn a win7 DVD. Does it have to be a boot DVD or just burn the iso regularly?

Also, how many times can I do a fresh OS install using the same CD key? I heard somewhere that once you delete the stock OS install, you're screwed and next time you do an install of windows 'anything', you have to provide a new key..any truth to this?

 

I would also like to know the answer to this.

Bendok, did you have any problems activating windows 7 on your new SSD with the windows 7 product key provided on your laptop?

Thanks to anyone who could provide an answer and sorry for a noob-ish question.

 

I currently have the A1 version, which comes with 6GB RAM, and I just ordered 1 SODIMM of 4GB 1333. I think the specs state that 8GB is the max (d'oh!!!).

Will the 4GB still work in the slot and the system will only address 8GB instead of 10GB? Or will I have to either replace the 4GB with a 2GB, or will I be able to remove one of the existing 2GB and have the new 4GB installed?

 

Just install the 4GB in the slot under the keyboard and it will recognize 10GB.

The G series ASUS laptops actually support 16GB total memory, even though the specs say 8GB.

 

The i7 version supports 16gb, the i5 only 8

 

How do you access the 4th memory chip? I know where its located now but cant figure out how to get to it.

I called Asus and they told me 8Gb only. I read in a few places 16Gb. Can anyone verify if this is true? Also is our memory triple channel compatible or only dual channel?

 

ASUS was reading from their specifications. the ASUS G53JW-A1 will support 16GB DDR3/1333. Since it is using 4 pieces it will not support triple channel, but dual and triple channel is 92% marketing fluff and 8% real performance improvement...not enough real world performance increase to even notice.

 

next question I have had my computer appart, how the heck do you get to the one memory slot underneath the key board that is hidden under the sheet metal? I have seen three of the four slots. Kingston even shows 8Gb max.

 

I think someone mentioned that it's under that black plastic in the middle, I'm not sure.

 

Just lift the black plastic sheet right under the keyboard to see the empty memory slot.

 

Thats the obvious memory slot there is another located in front of that closer to the touch pad but its hidden and you really have to disassemble the laptop to get to that one. I have had the laptop apart enough where I accessed the HDD and some of the other parts but not the 4th memory slot.

 

The 4th slot, which is already filled at the factory, requires removing the screen and taking the entire bottom case apart.

 

Hi and thanks for the awsome guide. I've been watching these threads for the last week or two and finally bought a G53JW-XR1 this past Sunday as well as 16gig ram and your guide totally helped with the first half of the process but I can honestly say getting to the fourth ram slot was a bear to get to and took just as long as the first three all together.

 

lol at 16gb ram, what are you planning on doing to require 16gb ram?

The sweet spot these days for common users using Vista/7 is 4gb ram, 6gb for enthusiast and 8gb ram for max benefit for running super duper programs etc..

Are you just getting 16gb ram for bragging rights just so you could say you have the best?

 

Anyone know the specs for the SSZ3128M8-EDJEF Asint memory, my Asus G53JW-A1 came with this chip in it. I have searched and that part number is not listed anywhere. What is the difference in Elpida and Hynix memory?

 

Sorry for my bad English :s

My laptop is an Asus G53JW-SZ105V

I buy Corsair Value Select SO-DIMM DDR3 2 Go PC10600 ref:CMSO2GX3M1A1333C9

My Ram is not compatible with my Laptop ? because when I plug the RAM Corsaire, the Laptop does not start

An idea ?

Thanks

 

That part number is showing 240 Pin according to Kingston our computers use 204 Pin, you could possibly burn something out powering the system with that ram in it.

 

Ok, and you recommend to buy Kingstom Ram for this Laptop ?
And this laptop is really max 16Go ?

Thanks

 

Kingston is good, Crucial is also good. I am sticking with the memory that came in it, just found a place that sells another 2Gb chip. Asint SSZ3128M8-EDJEF which is Elpida memory chips.