4 screwdrivers.
1 Leatherman.
1 pair of tweezers.
1 card table.
34 screws.
10 pieces of tape.
2 very thin and far-too-easy-to-bend aluminum heat shields.
2 hours.
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1 iBook with a new 40GB hard drive.
I've never been a person particularly afraid of putting things together or taking things apart, especially with directions as clear as this. So with Mrs. Dave cursing the day she chose her current profession (she had to work today, and has to work on Monday too...oog) I rolled up my sleeves, got out the tools and our card table, set it up in the office (so I could consult the tutorial) and went to work.
As early as the first step - taking out the first three screws in the bottom casing - I realized that I needed some sort of organizational plan. Fortunately, the card table was big enough for me to just start lining up rows of removed computer guts, in groups for each step of the instructions. I think the screws came in at LEAST seven different types and sizes. I was lucky I'd bought that jeweler's screwdriver at CVS earlier that morning, because I'd had a hunch the 3mm screwdriver I had wouldn't cut it. Good hunch. This thing is hair-thin but strong, and saved my day. Even went so far as to allow me to remove a screw that could only be reached by ejecting the CD tray to its complete extension, and then threading the screwdriver down through the ejector rail at an angle to unscrew it. Oh yeah, this guy's good.
It took me maybe an hour to get the whole thing apart, by which point I just needed to take a break and stretch and that aroused the cats' suspicion suddenly - "Hey! The male human is home! He must GIVE ME SOME LOVE!" Bogus then made the fatal error of following me back to the office, where I suddenly had a horrific vision of her jumping on the table, legs splaying in slow motion as she skids around on the surface, kicking my meticulously-placed screws every which way, sundering the fragile heat shields, leaving claw marks on the screen and hair on the keyboard (well, that last one she does already...I need to get a can of compressed air...). I chased her out of the room, closed the door, and ignored her pleas to come in. I was in the zone.
The two hardest parts of the whole process weren't what I expected - two normal screws in the battery compartment just refused to come out without a fight, and detaching the speaker cables on the underside of the top casing (and plugging them back in...these parts are NOT made for adult-sized fingers). But everything came out of and went back into the places they were supposed to, and I managed to get through the whole thing only dropping one screw on the floor. Okay, I dropped it twice, and it took me five minutes to FIND it the first time, but still. And then the first time I got it back together, the track pad (it's NOT a mouse, dammit) wasn't responding, but that was quickly remedied by an emphatic reinsertion of the ribbon cable into the connector. Even managed to clone the backed-up data back onto the new hard drive...though I had to do it twice since I stupidly named Mrs. Dave's new hard drive the same as Mr. Dave's old one, so it just copied all of the shit from one of my hard drives to her hard drive, rather than from the backup. Oopth.
But now I am happy to report that the laptop is back to being almost as good as new, except for an incontinent battery that has been leaking charge since the day we got it. No more leaving the Li-ions in the bay when the laptop is at the desk...
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