reeflotz: October 2013

Recently studied this free open source program, after being a 3ds Max user for a year (studied it through online tutorials I could find), personally I find Blender to be a much better program as a 3D hobbyist tool for creating digital art and visualization.

Apart from it being free, it loads faster and has a smaller size yet feature packed. I find it's interface quite efficient as well, although it is still improving. While true that the standard as far as I know is 3ds Max and Maya when it comes to animation and games, Blender with it's cycles renderer is starting to rival those paid products in my opinion. As a hobbyist, and not really a CG student/professional, Blender is a great tool for me to create 3D content which is widely used today.

If you haven't tried Blender yet then give it a chance, it's a nice program. For tutorials just go to Andrew Price's website http://www.blenderguru.com which has easily helped me understand more about Blender.

http://www.blender.org/

A guide to disassembling and cleaning your Asus K43 laptop.

This is quite long, and unfortunately to be able to clean the fan on this kind of laptop a lot needs to be removed before we can get to cleaning the fan.

Tools needed:

Philips screwdriver (preferably magnetic)
Flat Screwdriver
Brush
compressed air can or blower.

Important note: I will not be responsible if you damage your laptop while following this guide.

Still everything should be fine since I'm currently using this laptop that I disassembled a while ago to post this blog entry. In other words it's still working! My laptop ran much cooler too.

Some important things to remember when disassembling the laptop:

Always use the appropriate size and type of the screwdriver.
Be very careful when prying out different parts of the laptop.
Keep track of all the screws removed.
Work in a well lit environment.

We do not want any broken clips, loose threads, damaged screws to happen. You'll definitely regret disassembling your laptop if those happen, still chances of those happening are very slim as long as you do it carefully.

Okay, first thing we need to remove is the keyboard panel, which looks like this:

yes, that's the keyboard panel

To do that we need the flat screwdriver to pry it out. There are four places where we will pry it out see image below:

Remove the top part first, then the bottom part last. There are a lot of clips which holds this panel, just carefully pull them out. Now the reason why the bottom part will be the last part we remove is because it has a hook at the bottom as shown in the pic below.

After removing it, simply use a brush to clean the top part of the keyboard:

brush away the dust

For the panel, just wash it with soap and water, then let it dry and it should be good:

wash

Next is we remove the screws at the bottom of the laptop. Get your philips screwdriver ready! Marked in red circles are the screws we need to remove:

Don't forget to remove that warranty sticker!... Wait What?!

noooooo!

We then remove the cover for the harddisk and ram, and more screws we need to remove, see image below:

moar screws

Next is to remove the harddisk, Simply pull it out in the direction shown:

After removing the harddisk, remove one more screw which was blocked by the harddisk previously

Next is to remove the keyboard, flip the laptop back up, then press on the clips using the flat screwdriver and lift the keyboard:

There are four clips, pry out the keyboard from each of those, then lift the keyboard slightly 45 degrees.

Next is to remove that flex cable which connects the keyboard to the motherboard. To do that simply pull down gently the black clip, then remove the flex cable:

After removing the keyboard, more screws and two more flex cables needs to be removed, for the flex cables, simply push the clip upwards, then we can remove the cables easily.

moar screws and cables

After removing the screws, we simply pull out the DVD drive:

Next, after removing the DVD drive, there are two screws just below the aluminum frame to the right, which was previously hidden by the DVD drive, we need to remove those two also:

hidden screws

Next, we pry out the aluminum frame, there is a clip near the hinge of the laptop, one on the left and one on the right, push those clips using the flat screwdriver while prying out the aluminum frame, see pictures below:

Finally after removing it, we get to see the motherboard, next is to remove two screws and the flex cable, for the flex cable, push the clip upwards, then remove the flex cable.

Motherboard

After doing so, we can now lift the motherboard to its side, and remove all the dust from the fan using a blower or compressed air can. I also removed the black tape like sheet on the radiator fins when I cleaned my laptop, although be very careful when you do so, because the tape can tear apart. After removing it and cleaning the laptop from dust, I placed that black tape back.