What are the minimum steps needed to remove the bottom cover of a Lenovo T400 laptop?

Question

I want to remove the bottom cover of my laptop to access the bottom side of its motherboard. The Lenovo maintenance manual contains lots of unneeded steps (e.g. remove bios battery?!). What are the minimum steps required?

Answer 1

Thinkpads are really nice about actually labelling which screws you need to remove what.

I believe if the symbol for motherboard. Removing any screws with this symbol near the hole should let you access the motherboard. In some cases you may need to remove the keyboard

That's these screws.

Depending on why you need access to the motherboard, you might just need to remove the ram screws, and in some cases ram is under the palmrest.

All of this information along with disassembly instructions can be found in the Hardware Maintenance Manual for this particular model.

Answer 2

Lenovo manual emphasizes modularity. So in place of saying remove the screw under the LCD cable it says remove LCD and so on.

Here are the really required steps:

• Remove the keyboard as explained in the manual.
• There is a screw under the cable from LCD connecting the motherboard to lower cover. We have to remove it. The LCD cable has a screw on top. So we need to remove that screw, disconnect the LCD cable from the motherboard, and then remove the screw below it.
• You have to remove the screws for the lower cover at the bottom of the laptop as explained in the manual.

These should suffice, no need to remove speaker, memory, bios battery, etc.