My always reliable Sony VAIO VGN-FE series.

After serving for almost 3 years without any problems, my VAIO finally showed her first sign of weakness. She kept losing her WiFi signal when moving her slightly or when pressing on the right front. After inspection, the front WiFi switch seemed to be faulty. This meant opening her up and replacing the switch and while doing so, giving her some extra attention.

Things I did during the maintenance:
- Got rid of all dust
- Replaced the WiFi switch
- Replaced the battery
- Upgrading RAM
- Replacing front LEDs

Only open up a laptop if you know what you’re doing. There will be a lot of unscrewing action and super tiny connectors to be disconnected (those flat ones are most annoying . Laptops are compact and parts tightly packed together, therefore it may be hard to see how a part is connected. Be gentle and don’t rush anything. You can easily damage something and to replace it may be expensive. Also use the right set of tools; you don’t want to damage any screws.

First step is to get rid of the most obvious parts like the battery pack, Hard drive and the RAM modules. Then start unscrewing the bottom plate. From here on it gets tricky. You’ll see a lot of other screws and parts. Just take it easy and remove everything in the order you think it’s best.

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Because the laptop is open anyways, it’s a good opportunity to un-dust the whole thing. Any air-in-a-can will do. Hold down any fan (so it won’t spin) before hosing it with air.
Replacing the WiFi switch was fairly easy, considering I had to unscrew 58 screws and loosen 12 connectors to get the motherboard out.

After replacing the switch I decided to replace the front LEDs as well with brighter white ones. Just to make it more funky.

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Finally I upgraded the RAM from 1 Gb to 2 Gb and replaced the battery pack with a new one. Ordered it at Dealextreme. They had a good alternative for an original battery pack which costs 3x more and has less capacity (4100mAh instead of 4400mAh).