Vaio FZ unscrewed; how-to tutorial

Exactly the same. There are screws holding the keyboard in place which you have to undo. Here is another take on unscrewing the FZ - CLICKY.. Basically the same except this guy takes the whole lcd panel off - which you don't need to do.

 

Yes, the screws on the hinges also holds the back cover I believe so they need to be removed.

 

Cleaned my whole FZ today and applied new thermal paste. Running a lot cooler now. Here is a picture of the CPU and GPU with the heat sinks and pipes removed. Sorry, lame quality since I took it with my mobile under low light conditions but hopefully it gives you an idea on what to expect.

Btw, my FZ was overheating quite a bit. On the up side, its quite easy to take apart although the keyboard media panal can be slightly tough but some commited effort and I got it off safely. Once the hinges have been released its in quite a fragile state so I used a recommended pillow to lie the laptop on whilst cleaning it. On the inside everything is very constructive and things are laid out in a very organised manner

Next is I'll probably take the keyboard off - that procedure is slightly extended.

 

How much cooler?

What were the temps before the "surgery"?

What are they now?

Did you encounter any dust inside, that might have contributed to higher temps initially?

What brand of thermal paste did you use?

Gary

 

Lol - I didn't really think people cared since the FW has been released since.

- I hadn't cleaned my laptop since brand new, so one year.
- My temps over the past months were around 72 - 75C idle for both GPU and CPU. Whilst gaming, both would be around 90C......CPU at max 92C and GPU max at 95 - 96C.
- Now, temps at idle are around 50 - 55C. Whilst gaming GPU is max at 68C and CPU at 75C
- There was a considerable amount of dust though not as much storm3016's laptop. There wasn't that much in the fan though I still took it out to give it a thorough blast with air. Most was stuck in heat pipe.
- I used arctic silver 5 as the paste for both CPU and GPU. I cleaned the heatsink and both components with arcti clean kit (material remover & purifier).
- The orginal thermal paste definetly needed to be re-applied since it almost non existant.

All in all, my laptop is happy to be healthy again. . I'm considering undervolting my CPU to further lower my temps - if I get down to 70C whilst on max that'll make my temps perfect over the next few months.

 

Great Job Storm with sharing your experience. Also thanks Jam for the other link with the usefull pictures (I didn't went that far in removing the heat pipes, because there was nothing there and I wasn't that well prepared with a good arctic silver paste).

Now my cooker FZ is a bit of a warmer (didn't find that much dust inside) Nevertheless idle CPU temperatures dropped instantly by switching to XP.

Enjoy your hollidays and Happy New Year to you!

 

Most of my dirt was stuck in the vents along the heat pipe and I only saw this by removing the heat pipe. Since cleaning it out I've been undervolting my CPU. So far I've managed to cut 10C off my max temp and my idle temps hover around 40C now. A bit more tweaking could drop the temps more but I'm more than happy how they are.
It seems that all Nvidia 8xxx gpu's are faulty........I just hope my laptop survives atleast another year.

 

Nice work !!!

 

Wow, cool! Good work!

Has anyone done the same to, or do you know of any good pics which show the interior of a Vaio SR?

 

Hi jam I got an fz190 vaio , and I'm getting around 86 - 88 C while gaming on my 8400M GT , problem is I don't know if this model has thermal pads or it's got just the heatsink on top of the dies. If it's got thermal pads when I remove the heatsink I would have to add a copper plate to fill the gap. Do you know by any chance if my notebooks is same as yours? did you have to do the copper sheet mod?.
I don't want my Fz to die we all know about faulty 8400 which is aproblem about tolerating heat cold cold heat states.

 

Nope I didn't have to do a mod or anything. Just cleaned the old crappy thermal paste and applied arctic silver and then screwed the heat sink back on. Only other thing was there was a piece of rubber or something stuck on the heatsink which goes directly on top of the northbridge but I left this how it was.

 

hi mate I just want to say thx for your post...it really helped me to fix my notebook.

 

So tell us, kukiz1984 . What did you fix? Share your knowledge with the rest of us.

Gary

 

Hi all
i just thought i share my experiences.

i've just finished cleaning two FZ's. my friend’s lappy had serious problem with overheating. in idle CPU/GPU was around 65/70 C, while under stress temp raised up to 87/90 C. as for my own lappy, it was pretty much OK - fan was rather quiet for most of the time, and the temp for idle was ablout 50/55 for CPU, and GPU respectively. under stress 65/70 - this is rather rough value, but its way cooler than my friend's lappy.

after more than a year of heavy use i was very surprised to see unscrewed vaio clean. i expected it'd be much dustier. in fact the only place that dust had placed was radiator underneath the fan. in case of my own vaio it was less than a finger nail. this is probably due to the fact i often cleaned my vaio with a vacuum cleaner. as for my friend’s lappy, which was overheating, the case was different. amount of dust was so large that it blocked air coming out through the radiator.

now it runs much much more cooler. and quieter - in idle fan can be considered as silent. for idle temp dropped from 65 to about 44-46 for CPU, and for GPU from 70 to 52-55.

most probably, as someone has mentioned just before, it could be further improved by applying new thermal past. i didnt think about this before the process, but definitely will do it next time.

overall i can say that this is recommended if you want to keep your lappy relatively cold and quiet. one important note: i've discovered that if you take the temp readings they can significantly differ depending on the surface your lappy is put on. if it is solid, e.g. table it'd defiantly lower than compared to bed. in my case difference was about 8 C. this is worth remembering when comparing.

PS: many thanks to the author of this thread - i didn't know that the upper panel with media keys has to be removed.

 

hey guys...
im new to this forum but i came across it while googling for solutions of overheating.
My Laptop Config:
FZ190- T7500 2.2GHZ- 4GB RAM- Nvidia M8400GT- 160GB 5400RPM- VISTA 32Bit

from the temp numbers i've seen in this thread... mine seems to be extraordinarily high.
(Using SpeedFan w/ Zalman LAPTOP COOLER)
Idle:
Core- 71C GPU: 83C
Half-way:
Core- 85C GPU: 90C
Max(on game Team Fortress 2)
Core- 90'sC GPU: 106C (max i've reached)

FYI: I owned my laptop for almost 2 years now (got it when it first came out) and i've never cleaned out my fan/heatsink...

Is this abnormal? should i send it in for SONY to check it?

 

WHOA!!! Those numbers are VERY high. I am idling at 50C right now. What sort of surface is the FZ sitting on? You should NEVER place it on a soft surface as there are air vents on the BOTTOM of the machine as well. It should always be on a hard surface. If those are hard surface numbers you need to get it cleaned ASAP.

Gary

 

i guess it is very abnormal...

These temps were recorded on a notebook cooler which was on a hard surface table.

btw how often should you clean out your laptop?

 

I've yet to clean it out, but only because my temps are staying in the "normal" range.

Gary

 

WOW it sounds like the heat sink vents are totally clogged up with dust! think its time to dismantale the FZ and give it a good clean and fresh thermal paste.

 

I just cleaned my FZ21M after 1,5 years of service thinking there would be a LOT of dust inside, but to my surprise, it wasn't clogged up at all! but still, I took a lot of dust away from other parts, cleaned up nicely inside and put it all together.
My CPU runs at 42° doing nothing but surfing the web and having a chat.
GPU runs at 54° idle, which looks fine for a laptop, or even any GPU
don't know the temps running stressed, i'll find out tomorrow when using photoshop, flash and illustrator at school

thanks for the step-by-step tutorial, it was really useful!
grtz,

Mutsy

 

My senario is even worse than this, i need to take the mainboard off as my NVIDIA chipset just stopped functioning, i will create a thread after replacing my mainboard.
Peace

 

Hope people are still active in this thread.

I'm going to buy a OCZ Vertex 60gb for my FZ31M, is possible to just remove the old one by unscrewing the bottom left hatch. Taking the old one out and place the OCZ Vertex.
Cause to me the space to remove the old HDD is quite small.

Rather odd question xD but im not willing to take too much of a risk.

 

Yes you just remove the door, then three screws and slide the drive to the left and it comes right out. You will then need to remove the "carrier" from the drive, attach it to your new one and reverse the process. Of course there is the matter of getting the OS and data off your old drive and then onto the new one.

60 GB seems REALLY small. I am running out of space on my 160gb drive!

I don't understand what you are getting at with "Cause to me the space to remove the old HDD is quite small."


Gary

 

Thanks, I will just backup most of the data and reinstall Vista from dvd (might install XP). Although I wonder if I could use the serial on the back of my vaio to reinstall Vista, ofcourse uninstall vista on the old harddrive first.

I got a 1 TB external HD for my movies etc. The files I use most are on my internal drive. Most of these are Photoshop files and school documents. Im using up to 60 gb right now on my internal drive with some games and programs I am not using.

I saw a picture once that on the left side of the drive (when u take the cap off) is a small gap. I thought that cap wasn't wide enough to take out the whole drive. So you had to remove the entire case.

Thanks again.

 

Sup guys

I dropped my vaio laptop today and my Harddrive died RIP
It was a 7200rpm drive and now I put my old one in and everythings seems to work fine now.
Only problem I have now is that the left bottom of my laptop is damaged, the corner where all the bluetooth, battery, wlan lights are. And the lights are now messed up. They all seem to work but they have moved. And theres a little split also because everything has moved.
Anyways I unscrewed everything and came pretty far on my own but noticed that all the lights are under the motherboard So i stopped.
Then I found this topic, and now that I am seeing that pic of the back, I was wondering if it would be possible for me ( a noob) to lift the mobo and put the lights in order. Cause the mobo seems hard to lift

Thx

 

WOW... i just air dusted my laptop's heatsink area and vacuum the dust out... and a quarter-sized dustball came out.
plugged my laptop back up and measured the temp again...

Previous: Present:
GPU:75 C GPU: 58 C
CPU1&2: 60 C CPU1&2: 38-40 C

danggg

 

I just did this and would like to offer a couple tweaks to the procedure.

First, you don't need to remove all three screws on each of the hinges. Only the two outer screws (on each hinge) go into the bottom cover, but the center one does not. So the center screw can be left in place, and then you don't have to worry about the screen hanging by the wiring. Once I realized that and put the center screws back in, I was able to place the machine on a table with the screen hanging down over the edge and continue the cleaning.

Second, the fan assembly is held in place with four small screws and it was easy to remove those and flip the fan over with the wiring still in place. The rest of my laptop was almost completely clean, but I was astonished to find the output area of the fan completelyfilled with dog hair! It was probably down to something like 20% airflow, and I would have never known that without flipping the fan over.

Everything is safely back together now and running nice and cool. Thanks so much for posting this procedure!

 

Hello all. My first post here and please dont ask me how i missed this place after owning a FZ for 18 months, it's beyond me...

Just wanted to thank the topic creator for this excellent guide.
My core temp has decreased a good 20°C+ after cleaning the heatsink and fan area. Fan speed is significantly lowered and general happiness with my Vaio is fully restored

Cheers !

 

Great article. I spent so many hours trying to find how to disassemble my fz190. This article was key to doing it!

 

YEAH, after hours of searching the NET I found this thread and thanks god.!!! I really NEED Help.
My left touchpad button doesn't work anymore. Well it works sometimes when I press as hard I can. Seems that the contact isn't right.
And after a reboot, my touchpad scrolling and mousemovment is reversed. When I move to the top left, my mouse goes down right.
You all opened the back of the FZ, but is it possible to take of the black cover around the keyboard to free the touchpad area?

 

Hey, I got it open like in your tutorial. Cool. BUT how do I get to the touchpad area?? Could someone give me advice, before I damage my FZ. Please

 

Hello, new here...
was wondering if anyone tried replacing their processor?
Last time I opened up my laptop, I noticed there was a latch and the processor pops right out. I was thinking maybe I can upgrade my T7500 with a T7800 or an X7900.. any thoughts?

 

@goowiz Most of the cpus are soldered. But this plugable. Maybe it works. If you have success, tell us!

Need help. I took the hole thing apart, because my left touchpad button doesn't work really good anymore. But as I lift the mainboard a metall thing felt down. I wasn't fast enough to see where it comes from.
It looks like this


My friend and me though about a hour where this could be in right place. We didn't build it in back. The lappi works, but it seems it (maybe the hdd) is louder than before. Is there a pro outside, who knows where the things have to be?

 

Nice work Storm3016. It helped me a lot with opening my FZ21M to clean it up. I was wondering though if it is possible to change the VGA, in my case nvidia 8400M GT as I believe mine is dead due to overheating problems. One day Vista stopped booting up, restored, reinstalled them, nothing. Only in safe mode i could boot up so... no use. Formatted it installed Win XP SP3 and Win 7 evaluation edition, again problem with the installation of the vga drivers. It starts installing them but pc reboots without finishing the installation (win xp) or installation completes and when it does the restart to finalize it, it wont boot up again ( win 7 ) it stucks on the windows loading screen. So after much internet/forum research i came to the conclusion that my vga must have fried up. Too much gaming on a non gaming laptop with serious overheating problems i suppose. So my question is if anyone knows if its possible to change the nvidia 8400M GT either by buying the card myself or at the latter case to send it to sony and see how much it will cost and if its worth it..? Tomorrow i will make a last attempt to open it and reset the CMOS by removing the battery and try to locate the VGA to see if i can unpin it and pin it back again to see if these change anything.

 

Removing the CMOS battery isn't likely to be of any help. And there is no way to remove the GPU and replace it. It is soldered in place. You have two options. One, send it back to Sony for a $600-700 replacement of the motherboard. Or if you want to try one last resort, there is a thread here with a message in it detailing how someone has successfully reflowed the solder to under the GPU chip to substrate connections. (Which is the underlying issue with the Nvidia chips.)

Here is a link: Reflow Nvidia chip

This is NOT for the faint of heart and is a very tricky process that could render the whole thing useless, but seeing as how your machine is already in that state anyway, it might be worth a shot. Certainly beats throwing the machine into the trash heap.

If you DO attempt this let us know how it works out for you. I've had my FZ for almost two years and always fear I am living on borrowed time. I have a friend who does a lot of this type of soldering (reflow) and if/when my chip gives up the ghost I intend to take my FZ and that message in hand (along with a good six pack) to my friend and hope for the best!

Gary

 

With the help of the info posted here I managed to open up my Sony Vaio VGN-FZ21Z. I could fry an egg on my laptop so it seriously needed some cleaning. I cleaned out the fan and put everything back together. Started back up and unfortunately, USB mouse not working I checked and on the front right side the 2 USB ports and sound plugs are not working. Drivers are ok. No light on my mouse, nothing. Did I break something? A loose wire? What could it be?

edit: fixed, there was a connector loose below the HDD

 

My FZ190 died a couple of weeks ago, probably due to Nvidia GPU overheating. It won't turn on at all. I purchased an XPS 1340 to replace it, however I'm thinking about changing the MB myself with a used one from Ebay. Does anyone have pics of an integrated Intel Graphics MB with the heatsink/heatpipe? I found a non-Nvidia board on Ebay and need to compare both boards to see if it'll work. Thanks in advance.

 

Thanks alot for the tutorial it helped me with my FZ31S.

 

Hi guys,
I would be very happy to know how to fix/repair or reflow my GPU nvidia properly and in a secure way, I lost my FZ21Z 3 days ago.
In fact, I think that's not a really USER problem, it should be a SONY and NVIDIA problem. Does not seems fair that the USER that buy a "TOP" laptop and pay EU$ 1800,00 (like me) and need to be responsible to disassemble and clean dust, fans and stuff!!!
I'm VERY DISAPOINTED!!!!!!

 

6 months on and my temps are hitting 90C again . Very confused though since my CPU temps hit 90C and surly the thermal paste hasen't given up after 6 months - its meant to last forever!! And I also doubt there is enough dust accumulated over 6 months to cause a 15C increase.

Any suggestions?

EDIT:
Cleaned it out today and my max GPU temp is 70C.

 

Being quite hot these past few days (UK summer) my temps has gone up a few degrees also but nothing like yours though. Mine idles around 44c instead of the usual 38c (with undervolting)

 

hey, thanks a lot.
i'm wondering if you know how to solve a problem i'm facing right now,
the laptop is one of the FZs. i was playing a game and suddenly shut off as if it were unplugged. and now it wouldn't even start. what do you think has happened here???
oh also, there's a crazy voice coming from, I believe, where the fan is. is it due to the fan? it's only been 6 months and it's making such noise.
i would really appreciate your suggestions here.
thanks in advance.

 

I have FZ11S, when you start the laptop, the Vaio screen comes on for just a second and then display is almost black. When connected to the TV through HDMI port the windows is displayed on the TV and the laptop works fine. The bottom laptop gets exteremly hot.

Is this due to the faulty Nvidia Chip?

If not can What could be wrong with the laptop?

 

Please don't double post the same question in two threads. And please dont hijack a thread with a question unrelated to the title of the thread. This thread is about disassembly, not about video issues.


BTW I answered your question in the other thread where you posted this same question.

Gary

 

In all of the posts and pix regarding removing the keyboard, reference is only made to there being two screws, when in fact there are four -- two that are screwed into the back. Does anyone know how these are accessed?

 

In message #51 of this thread there is a link to this:

http://www.insidemylaptop.com/take-apart-sony-vaio-vgn-fz220-repair-power-jack/

It shows the keyboard removal, amongst other aspects of disassembly.

Gary

 

Hi there! I already searched for this on the forums and on google but couldn't find anything...I want to clean my FZ keyboard and I wanted to know if it's safe to "pop out" the keys as to clean them completely and also the surface below the keys. Can I just put my fingernails underneath the keys and pop them out on this model? On Vaio SZ you can and there's a guide but I don't own an SZ =P

Thanks!

 

how can i demontage the touchpad??

 

Thank you for hint, this instruction is very useful. I did on FZ31Z. THX again ;-)

 

Hi,
Just found this useful explanation how to dissasemble Sony Vaio. I have Sony Vaio VGN-FW190, and it is assembled same as this one presented.
The heatpipes that go above CPU and GPU are made of copper. I followed the procedure given here with no problems. You can take heatpipes and cooler down also. Just unscrew that few screws on cooling system you see and then you will be able to change thermal compound on both CPU and GPU, and also clean the fan. Good luck.

I changed thermal compound on CPU and GPU to prevent overheating.
Does anyone, with Sony Vaio, know some temperature monitoring program? How can I see my curent CPU and GPU temps? I tried with SpeedFan and I can see only CPU and Hard disk temps, but is there some program that shows GPU temp? Do Sony Vaio laptops have temperature sensors on GPU?