Well, I finally dove in and took apart the CF-W7 toughbook. Be warned, you will ruin the "spill proof: nature of your notebook.
1) Take out all screws on the underside of the notebook, keeping careful track of where they went ( the screws are different for different holes, so you will forget.) Also take out the middle screw along the top side of the notebook right under the edge of the open screen ( there are three screws along the top edge and that middle one holds the hard drive access cover. )
Turn over and slide the hard drive access cover toward the center of the bottom (about 3mm) and lift out. Unplug the hard drive and remove it.
Open the access door to the memory chip, take out the memory chip and remove the screw inside the memory chip receptacle.
Now, remove the plastic covers of the four keyboard clips (note these are part of the waterproofing and they will not stick back on afterwards) and remove the clips by sliding them down (the hinge is up).
Turn over the keyboard and slip a credit card under the top edge of the keyboard and gently pry up the keyboard from the two sided sticky tape that it is taped down with.
To remove the keyboard, you have to unplug it. The keyboard cable is again water insulated with very tough sticky plastic. which you have to peel up. Underneath the flat ribbon cable goes into a cable holder gently pry the white plastic holddown on the cable holder out to release the cable (the white plastic will not completely come out, which is good.
Of course this still gives virtually no access to anything.
remove the screws on the top of the case EXCEPT the screw just above the DVD switch on the front of the case. It holds in the solenoid that opens the dvd, and if you remove it, the central metal piece of the solenoid will fall out and you will not be able to figure out where it goes. Remover the two screws holding down the semicircular DVD since you have to get at a screw underneath that. That semicircular piece is again held down by double sided sticky tape, so you have to gently pry up on it to release it.
Now the top of the case is loose so you can lift it up to get at the guts beneath.
Make sure you remove the antennas from the left and right side corners of the case, underneath the plastic corner pieces.
In removing the top, it is glued to the bottom again by double sided sticky tape on the large piece of waterproofing plastic under the keyboard.
Either get under it to gently pry it up (it is very very sticky adhesive) or peel away that plastic watershield.
You now have access to the motherboard, etc.
Unplug the two white straps that go from the motherboard to the trackpad. This will make handling of that top cover far easier.
If you want to get at the fan, you have to lift the motherboard.
Peel back the cable holders on the top left side of the case which holds the screen cables and the power input cables. unplug the power input cable from the mother board. Unscrew the posts of the video connector and the EXT connector on the outside of the case so that this small piece of the motherboard can move. They can be inserted only by lifting the far edge of the motherboard where it links to the dvd board. Unplug the cable to the screen. (exctly how to do this I do not know as I finally never did it) remove the screws holding down the motherboard. unscrew the screw holding down the DVD driver board. Unplug the cable running from the dvd board to the dvdi drive mechanism. (be careful. That cable is very fragile and easily broken and a new DVD drive costs $600) You can now get at the fan underneath the motherboard and the wireless board.
To put it back together go in reverse. At this point is is obvious why you kept such careful notes of exactly which screws go where. That are about 50 of them altogether and many are different sizes.
You will have destroyed the water repellant properties of your computer.
You must be careful about flexing all those flat cable straps, as they can break (I broke the one on my dvd. So I now have no dvd on my machine. They want $700 for a new one.)
So, the alternative is to send it in to Heartland, the Panasonic repair centre in Kansas. And they will charge you $300 to replace the fan, for example.
Oh well.
Click to expand...
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
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