Datasheet

box less than

⁄4 inch thick and weighing short of 3 pounds. The price? Well, early

buyers could expect to pay somewhere between $2,700 and $3,000, but some

people can never be too rich or too thin.

Entering the Box

I describe the laptop as a sealed box, and for the vast majority of people, that’s

the way it will always be. This is very different from a desktop PC, which is read-

ily opened and is built with the expectation that it will be adapted, changed, or

expanded.

The main reason the laptop box is sealed is that its internal parts are so tightly

and intricately packed that it’s not easy for an untrained amateur — no matter

how experienced at fix-it projects — to reassemble it. The case is engineered to

be tough but light, sealed against the elements but still able to exhaust heat. In

addition to holding all of the pieces in a relatively secure box, it also is assigned

the task of guarding against radio frequency radiation, which might interfere

with other pieces of electronics. And finally, the parts within the case are mostly

proprietary to a particular manufacturer — these aren’t the same sort of compo-

nents you can buy off the shelf at your nearby super-duper-computer center.

I won’t ask you to pick up a screwdriver or a specialized tool to open the case of

a laptop. That task is better left to a professional repair shop. Later on, though,

I discuss those parts of the machine that are open to you, including memory

slots and plug-in expansion bays. But just so you can say you do know what lies

within, here are the major components inside the sealed box:

Motherboard

A motherboard is the place that holds the principal electronics of the computer,

with tiny etched wires (called

traces) that connect attached components or

sockets that hold removable chips. Branching off the motherboard are connec-

tors to various types of memory, storage, and input/output.

In the original design for personal computers, what was called the mainboard

started to be expanded through the use of smaller, attached boards of circuits

and chips. The mainboard became the motherboard and the smaller collections

of electronics the daughterboards.

Motherboards are very closely linked to the case that holds them; the main-

board from one maker’s machine is unlikely to fit into the case sold by another,

and only slightly less unlikely to move within the various models sold by the

same manufacturer.

14 Part 1: The Laptop Computer

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