Which notebooks are easiest to service and/or upgrade?

Which notebooks are easiest to service and/or upgrade?

Sorry if this has been asked before, but I don't seem to be having much luck with the search. I'm interested in knowing which notebooks are the easiest to repair yourself, say if you have to replace the motherboard or hard drive or CMOS battery. Which models have the most accessible innards? (as opposed to having to disassemble the whole thing to replace a CMOS battery, for example)

 

Very hard to say. Maybe a barebone build it yourself notebook? You can upgrade the harddisk, ram and cpu on almost all notebook exept the small laptops with soldered on cpus and sometimes onboard ram. Harddisk and RAM mostly just need to losen one screw and it comes right out.
Upgrading the graphics card is mostly not possible except in laptops with a MXM card mostly found in gaming 17" laptops.
Replacing the Motherboard is never easy and always very costly.

 

asus c90. plain and simple

 

Dell have the kindness to publish "Removal and replacement of spare parts" guides on their web site, so at least you know what you are doing. Most manufacturers don't make such information available to end users although, in some cases, the relevant information has been made public.

John

 

I guess I wasn't thinking when I wrote that. Should have said the processor. The motherboard is bound to be a job because everything is attached to it.

That's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. I'll have to keep my eye on that one. It isn't out yet as far as I can tell.

I didn't know Dell had the info on their website, though I've seen it elsewhere
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2766
and I've read that they include instructions in the manual that ships with the laptops. It doesn't look any too easy though.

 

I don't see how any laptop can be easy if you want to remove the motherboard, it will be a complicated task in any model.

As for the CMOS battery, this should last many years before it dies, by then everything else in the laptop will probably have gone before it.

As for hard drive, RAM, CPU. well the HP have easily accessible RAM and drives and they have detailed manuals for taking everything apart, though the business range may be harder to upgrade. Dell's should also be easy. I've heard some if not all LG's have only one stick of RAM visible, the other requires removal of keyboard.

 

The business range isn't difficult either. I've already been inside of my nc8430 with a technician because an LCD screen had to be replaced...it's all laid out very well.