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What is inside?
From the front you should be able to identify:
 | The CD drive. It often has a number like 10 times or 8 times and a
socket for a jack plug. |
| The hard disk might be evident but often there is just a light near a
little symbol |
| A 3 ½” disk drive |
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At the back
| Video and audio outputs: the socket to match the lead from the screen should
be identified. |
| Modem: you have a modem if you see a lead with a phone plus on it or a
socket to receive such a lead. |
| There will also be one or more parallel sockets for a printer with a
similar-looking socket known as a serial port. This is the mysterious
‘COM’ port you will find if you had to connect your external equipment
before the arrival of the USB. |
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Lifting the lid
It is vital that the power cable is disconnected before you start work. It is
not only much safer, but much easier to carry out the inspection and cleaning if
all cables are disconnected.
If you have a laptop, go no further. They are a modern miracle of close
packing. If you take them apart, you will never put them together again. The
components inside are not generic and cannot be switched, so there is no point in
exploring the innards.
Check for seals. These might still be intact. The seal will tell you that if you break
it the warranty is void. You should not be messing with the machine unless it is
years out of any warranty, so ignore this. If the seal is broken, it does not
mean that the machine has already been repaired. It is very normal to open
machines, even new ones, to fit extra bits inside. So it is not a bad sign if
you
find the seal is broken.
| You might find some notes written on the equipment or even a sticker inside
telling you how things are configured. |
| Lift the lid carefully as occasionally there are wires attached. |
| Next check for any loose leads. There are probably a few of these (see below).
It is also possible that you might find a few bits of loose plastic or screws.
Keep these.
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Getting to know the insides
The interior is dominated by cables.
| You might have to remove the cable ties to
let you move these aside. If you have to cut these, do it with care. You can use
bag ties when you reassemble the computer to tidy it up. |
| There are 2 types of cable: The flat, grey ribbon cables. These have plugs and sockets along their length.
When these sockets are attached to the cable, they push little pins through the
wire to make a connection. These are IDC, Internal Displacement Connectors. Do not
try to move or remove these. These are often made to measure, so if you move
things about, they might not fit. However, provision is almost always made for
extra data drives. There is a thin red line down one edge of the cable. If you
examine the plug or sockets attached to the cable, you will notice that they are
not symmetrical. Look very closely and you will find a little bar which can
only be put in one way. If you look very closely, you should find some numbers
moulded into the plastic.
There are bundles of thicker, brightly coloured wires which normally lead back
to the power supply. These are terminated in a range of plugs. There is a plug
to match almost every lead. |
| The power supply is easy to identify as it has all the coloured wires and the
fan. It is located at the rear, usually at the top, and normally has an on/off
switch. The give-away is the socket or sockets that will bring the electricity
in. If there are 2 sockets, one is male, the other female. One is for the power
supply cord and the second is for the display, but you can plug it into its own
supply. The advantage of looping through the computer is that the computer might
switch it on and off for you. |
| There is a set of racks or some other structure to support the various drives.
There are also special trays to support smaller disks. If you start switching disks
about, you need to make sure that you can match them to the rack. The hardware
bits exist but you might have to hunt about or improvise. There are bits of
removable plastic at the front to allow new drives to be fitted. The rack and
the front covers are of a standard size which provides a high degree of interchangeability. |
| There are different types of disk mounted on these racks. Hard disks come in several shapes. Older ones tend to be larger and fit in one of
the bays at the front. Smaller modern hard disks fit inside the ‘box’ and have a
pair of thin wires leading to a little light on the front panel. This should
flicker when the drive is fetching data. If the light does not go on and off, it
is an indication that there might be something wrong with your computer. The
physical size is no indication of the capacity of the disk.
CD drives are easy to identify. They either have a drawer that comes out to
receive your disk or a thin slot which ‘snatches’ any CD you present to it
(assuming it is not already occupied). There are many variations on this theme,
with CD writers and DVDs now common. They all perform the same function of
reading CDs and are physically and logically interchangeable.
Almost all computers before 2002 came equipped with a 3½” disk. This played a
vital role in starting the computer if something went wrong. As reliability
improved, disks were used to transfer data, but this role has now been taken over
by email and networks. For older machines, this disk is an important resource
and should be kept. |
| Do not assume that items that can be physically interchanged will work. Every
device requires some software called drivers to enable the computer to communicate with
it. Happily these can be found on the Internet and general-purpose, or generic, drivers are now part of operating systems. |
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The electronics
The most obvious feature inside the box is the motherboard, although you might
have to move the many cables aside to see it.Protruding from the motherboard at right angles will be
various cards.
One will
be the video card. This will have the socket for the video output for the
display and probably some audio sockets.
There will probably also be a board with the
electronics to link the drives to the computer. This has pride of place because
it has to accommodate so many of the flat data cables.
There might be a modem
which can be identified from the phone wire connected or a socket (or sockets)
attached.
There might be another card with various outputs on it. Some
computer manufacturers have brought down the cost by building these facilities onto the motherboard, so
the absence of attached boards is not a cause for worry.
You will also find banks of memory chips. These are the RAM. They can, in theory,
be swapped around. However, there are numerous compatibility issues, so do not
plan to change them too soon.
Interconnections
The boards plug directly into the motherboard. There are several sizes of socket and all
that is needed is to find one that matches. Apart from that, the physical
location is not important.
The drives need 2 sets of cables:
- The flat data cables
- Colourful power cables
Mercifully, the plugs are standard. All you need to do is match plug and
socket. It really is that easy.
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Lifting the lid Inside the box Cleaning
a computer Making it quieter
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