stuck at disassembling sony vaio SZ

Did anyone else needed to replace the fan? Its real pain, I wish I replaced my pc before losing my job.

I am out of warranty. So using the manual, I tried disassembling it myself but I am stuck at one step. Removing the hood. Did anyone else needed to remove it, if yes, how??

 

that piece just snaps off.

I dont reccomend doing this, i scrwed mine up and just mailed it in.

 

Disassembly guide:

http://rapidshare.com/files/269153706/vgnSZ.pdf

 

Im serious dude, i followed those exact same instructions and royally screwed min eup. You are probably better at it this than i am, but that laptop is extremely difficult.

 

be careful and goodluck!

Well, to be more clear, its difficult to replace the CPU and FAN. Hard-Drive, Optical Drive are easy enough.

 

if you are talking about the cpu fan, then you are opening the wrong side. it is very easily accessible by opening the 5 screws on the bottom of the laptop to remove the fan and the heat-pipe.
to remove it, you first need to remove the cover which is removed when RAM is needed to be replaced. it's fairly easy to remove the whole thing althogh i haven't tried removing just fan.

 

sorry jassalmithu - you're wrong.

Yes, you can see the fan from the underside, but you can't remove it because it's screwed to the main board.

You have to follow the disassembly guide almost to the end unfortunately.
I'm a pretty good tech, but replacing my SZ680 fan was one of the most stressful things I've done in a very long time.
To make it worse there are actually different fans with exactly the same part number - how crazy is that!?
My fan had a different plastic surround and one of the screw points to the main board was off by a couple of millimetres.
With all the time I'd already spent pulling it apart I wasn't putting it back together half finished so I took the time to modify the fan I had and made it fit - even more stress.

Back to the original post - the hood snaps off. Take your time and be gentle. I thought I cracked mine for sure when I took it off, but it was fine.
You've still got a long way to go from there - make sure you keep a detailed record of what you're doing as you go - it's a lot easier to follow your own pictures and notes than the guide when putting it all back together.

 

I replaced mine as well..I broke the microphone connector and had 1 screw leftover at the end. And I was really careful...took photos at every step. It's been almost 8 months now and it's still running though ;-)

 

The hood did give me alot of problem, too.

Anyway, I managed to remove it last Saturday.
Just as a reminder. You MUST BE very gentle at this step. The hood, according to the guide, will have to be lifted up from the front (like some rotating action using the detents at the back as hinges).

At this point, you can probably lift up the hood at your right side but not your left---you'll probably break/deform the hood if you try to lift it up by force.

I've attached a picture for your reference (mine's a VGN-SZ5 but I think they should be the same).

You'll need to use a philip screw driver/a bamboo spatula...etc (something flat) to insert into gap between the hood and the unit chassis ( be gentle and straight!) so that the hidden detent can disengage from the chassis.

This is pretty tricky but it'll allow you to remove the hood successfully w/o causing any damage to it. (This is similar to removing the keyboard; after you disengaged the two detents there're actually two more (static detents) at each top corner of the chassis which prevent you from lifting up the keyboard as mentioned in the manual.)

With so many untold "traps" encountered, I'd suggest you be really patient while disassembling the unit or, just put everything back if you think it is not worth taking the risk.

Good luck!