| Compaq thinkpad | How to fix a Compaq armada using hardware from an IBM thinkpad. |
I have owned a Compaq Armada 4120 for some time. I got it because it did not work very well. In fact it did not start and before, battery was broken and the keyboard did not work either. When I got it I got it running and with some tricks I got the keyboard. The battery still does not work but there are almost always possible to connect it to some other power source.
The hard disc was not very big (~ 1 Gb) so I decided to install only Debian GNU/Linux on this machine which is documented.
But the lucky days was over sometime this summer when the hard disc decided to stop working. You was able to hear a rhythmic chung-cung-sound from it and it was not possible to access it at all. It was simply broken...
At the company I workes for they have owned an IBM thinkpad that stopped working because it could not stand the head in Indonesia. The processor simply got too hot. So it have been there broken for about two years. In early november 2001 I got a new idéa. Why not try to use the hard disc from that computer. And maybe there are other nice equipment available.
So I started to remove the hard disc from the IBM thinkpad. That sounds quite easy. Open and remove. WRONG! It was not easy at all... First you had to remove the keyboard. To do that you have to remove a couple of screws on the back (tried to order them, see picture on the right side). That was the easy part. It was a lot trickier to actually remove the keyboard. But if you have a sharp and flat screwdriver you can do that.
To remove the keyboard you also have to unplug it. You do that by lifting up tiny plastic parts and pull out the tiny plastic wires. This is at least better than on the Compaq Armada... I can not tell if if works though. :)
When you have removed the keyboard you can take a look inside the computer. What you will notice is that everything except is hard to access. You have to remove a couple of new screws, a metallic plate just to access anything in there (see picture on the left side).
Now it is time to remove the hard disc (I thought). It is protected by a metallic plate. When you remove that one you will find another one (surprise).
Now you can remove the hard disc. But it is quite tricky. Tricky enough to convince me that I had to remove more. And removing more is very hard. Well it should not be very hard but one of the screws was stucked so I had to get a drill and drill it out. It was destroyed and I was a bit worried about the hard disc (placed about 1 cm behind the screw). But it worked out very well.
I also removed a lot of other stuff like:
Yes it was tricky to put it back together. I have two screws that I do now know that to do with. :)
Screen It was pretty simple. Just remove four screws a the back and two inside and unplug (just lift it up) the connecting cable.
Power connection You can also remove the power connector. To do that you have to remove a big metallic plate which covers most of the mainboard. I was hoping to find memory and processor behind this. I found the processor hard led to the mainboard. I still do not know where the memory is located. Probably some of the circuits on hard led on the mainboard. That was a bit dissapointing because I hoped that it was the same type as the compaq one. It was not. :(
The Compaq Armada 4120 is a bit easier to handle (at least that is what I think after fiddling inside it about 20 times).
First you have to remove the docking part that holds the cd-rom (only?).
When you have done that you have to remove the two tiny screws that holds the hard disk slot. Then you simply take it out. Remove the four screws that holds the disc and disconnect the cable. So now I switched the old broken drive with the bigger one from the IBM thinkpad.
And then you put the disc back.
One big problem with this computer is the keyboard. It is simply a very bad design of the connection between the keyboard and the motherboard. The connectors should not simply be pressed together without a real connector.
To clean the connecting parts you have to remove the keyboard. To do that you have to remove the floppy, hard disk, and mouse/trackball.
Well actually you can remove the keyboard without removing this parts but it is a lot harder and you tend to break the shell.
You also have to remove four screws (long ones) and then use a screwdriver (flat) to snap away the keyboard. It looks easy on this pictures (below) but then I have done the work with the screwdriver already. Actually I think I took the pictures when I was about to put the keyboard back.
You can probably see the little blue thing. That is the problem! You have to clean that one and the corresponding part on the motherboard. It should really be clean so do not touch it after the cleaning. When that is done you can put everything back together.
Sometime you need to reset the bios. You do that by unplugging the battery for a long time. The battery is placed with the extra memory and is best accessed if you turn it upside down. It helps if you remove the trackball but it is not necessary. You do not have to remove the two screws there because they do not hold the plastic part. You just use a screwdriver and open it the hard way. Open it on the end that is closest to the trackball.
When you have reseted the bios (or switched memory) you can put the plastic back again.
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