doube.org::Acer Aspire 3023WLMi Dissection Page

Dissecting your Acer Aspire 3023WLMi

And possibly other Aspire models too...

Disclaimer: you are about to rip into your notebook. Expect a little damage to the plastic parts. If you do this, you are probably invalidating your factory warranty, and could cause expensive problems. If you do, I can take NO RESPONSIBILITY. Hopefully these notes help you decide whether the risk is worth it.

My orginal motivation to do this was because I thought I had bluetooth, but the device wasn't showing up in either Fedora Core 4 or WinXP - probably good evidence that it wasn't installed as a manufacturing option - but I needed hard evidence of its presence or absence. So I learned how to open an Aspire 3023... and caused a little case damage in the process (nothing that's unfixable with a pair of snips and a bit of sticky tape).

If you just want to replace your optical drive, read this page.

Getting started

Download a copy of the service manual from this site.
Turn off your notebook, and unplug it from the AC adaptor

Getting amongst it

Remove the battery
Fire up your digital camera so you can remember where all the parts go
Remove the covers from the wireless LAN bay and the combined RAM / hard drive bay.
I unplugged my HD, but that might not be necessary.
Also unplug the black and grey snap connectors from the WLAN card, noting which way round they go. These are aerial wires that run up the back of the monitor
Unscrew every screw you can see, taking care to keep them all, and noting that they are not all the same size
Flip the notebook into its normal position and open the monitor as far back as it goes. Cover up the screen with a bit of cardboard or something soft in case you drop something
Carefully prise the rear top panel (the one with the power, mail, internet, e and p buttons in it) As an aside, where I am from, both 'e' and 'p' are hardcore party drugs. Are Acer trying to tell us something?
I said carefully!!. You have to lift kind of from the back. The little plastic clips that keep it all together aren't very strong, and they bend and break. Acer did not build these units to ever be taken apart.
You should now be able to see the graphics cable going up the left monitor hinge and the WLAN aerial going up the right monitor hinge
For the Aspire 3003WLMi, alternate disassembly proceeds as follows: (thanks Alan Boba)
- Close the monitor
- Turn to the back of the computer and remove the screws in the hinge covers if they've been left in
- Pop the three hinge covers up from the back of the computer
- Turn the computer around and open the monitor all the way
- Continue to lift the hinge covers pivoting at the junction between the hinge cover and the keyboard (the hinge cover should slide out nicely now)
Unscrew the keyboard at the rear left (only one screw holds it in), and remove it from the membrane cable connector. These connectors have a locking part that slides out from the main body of the connector while connecting and disconnecting, and slides in to hold the membrane cable in place. If you are only removing / replacing your keyboard you are done
The bluetooth adaptor plugs in to a plug labelled BLUE1 at the rear right of the notebook, near the right monitor hinge. Plugging in should be straight forward, there's a wee bay in there that the dongle should fit right in. I don't know what they look like as I haven't got one (d'oh!), but they may need a bit of packing to stop them from rattling around.
You may have to remove the monitor from the notebook by unscrewing screws in its metal feet.
You might also want to remove the main cover to check out the rest of the hardware, or if you are replacing the touchpad or something like that. Now is the time to do that. The WLAN and Bluetooth LEDs get caught at the front of the notebook, and you may have to remove a couple more screws. Take care not to damage the touchpad membrane cable
I think that's about it: at least that's as far as I got. There are spare-parts merchants around if you look/google hard enough, I remember seeing one about ordering Bluetooth dongles in the UK (for £7) but I lost the URL, sorry :-(. I found this place, which you may find helpful.
From what I read, Acer service people aren't very understanding about after-market modifications or upgrades - they won't do them, apparently, so make sure the notebook you buy has the specs you want. The exceptions here are RAM ( I fitted an extra Gig, no worries), HDs and possibly WLAN cards.

Stick it all back together

Just go in reverse order, take care to put the right screw back in the right hole and fasten the membrane cables in place.

Finally, if you pop a button off your keyboard, it's not the end of the world. They are a bit tricky to replace. Unless you have actually fractured one of the fiddly little bits underneath the key you can snap them back on again. I will leave that up to you to figure out!

Take care, and if you like, email me.

Heat Sink Problems

I received this in an email from a brave reader:

You might have noticed, when revealed the main board, that the processor
has its own heatsink and the graphic has its own. Cooled by the heat pipe and heatsink system.
Well... My laptop is around 2 years old now. (I read you since then you know ;))
Using it mainly under Windows, caused symptoms of overheating once...
around 3 months ago. The system went unstable (though it didn't crash) the screen was dodgy.
I already thought, that this is the end of it. Will go bust in no time. Shame.
Then I performed Aspirotomy myself, unscrewed everything, removed the mainboard
(with heatsinks in place) by accident looking in between them.
What I saw, was that, though the main graphic chips were touching the heatsink, the graphic memory was not.
To confirm that, I unscrewed the graphic heatsink and ... bingo. NO THERMAL PASTE, NO NOTHING on graphic memory...
never was there. And the gap between the heatsink (actually an ordinary rectangular piece of copper,
totally flat) and the memory was about 1-1.5 mm... no wonder it was overheating.
So what I did was, I made 4 aluminium foil and thermal paste sandwiches.
(by the way, the original thermal paste on graphic chips was deteriorated already,
so I did the same for those 2 (sandwiches here too, though not so thick as on memory,
because the factory has spared on appropriately shaped piece of copper :P))
Then screwed it all together again, decided to look under the processor heatsink,
cursed the factory heavily, and put new thermal paste there too...

Imagine, the original thermal paste was more similar to play-doh cushion
than to what it should be. Oh well. Discarded all that mess...

If you try this, keep in mid the paste/aluminium cushions must be *exactly*
the size of chips to be cooled - more appropriate if they were slightly smaller, though.
By less than 0.1 mm. Done all that with pair of scissors and small tube of thermal paste :)
I'm not taking any responsibility if you make it too thin and it will fall out of its place
and burn your laptop down :) nor if you make it too thick and you damage the chips :)
(this note is for web readers ;)

Then assembled the laptop together again, fired up... and there it was... up and running,
no more overheating symptoms. Noticed also more heat being fanned out of the
graphic card heatsink, and the fan actually running shorter periods.

Lukasz Sokol
29/11/07 10:13

Other Models

If this isn't quite what you're after, try repair4laptop.org for more models and links to useful information

Doube.org's International Visitors

This file last modified 1442hrs 10 December 2007 © Michael Doube 2004-2008 :: Designed to be interoperable and standards-compliant. Looks best with Mozilla Firefox

doube.org.research

doube.org.vet

doube.org.linux

doube.org.contact

doube.org.bookmark