Repair4Laptop: Disassembly Guide for Toshiba Satellite L40 Laptop

Battery Removal

Attention: remove the power supply and the battery before starting to take apart the laptop.

Survey of the Internal Parts

The hard disk drive - HDD at the bottom, at the top: RAM, modem and WLAN.

Get the Hard Disk Drive Out

Remove 4 screws (marked red) and pull the latch.

Get the Memory Out

Get WLAN and Modem Out

Remove All of the Screws

Get all the 22 screws out.

When the plate in the upper right corner has been removed from the notebook, you can detach the white plug (left) to the display and the screw (right).

Get the Keyboard Removed

This trick shows how to open the keyboard and take it out. The red screwdriver pushes the notch in, the silver screwdriver lifts the keyboard up.

Lift the keyboard off.

Remove the keyboard cable.

Remove five screws.

Here comes some additional information about pushing the optical drive out of the case.

Finally the optical drive can be taken out easily.

Remove two screws from the bottom.

Here the rubber plugs covering the screws have been removed (4 at the top and 2 at the bottom).

The plastic frame has been removed, the same way as steps 2 to 4 in this HOWTO: Toshiba Satellite L35 .

With the display opened in that certain angel, it's now possible to loosen the two screws. But you have to be extremely careful when bending the plastic frame back. But this way it is possible to remove the remaining two screws.

Now the display cover on the right side can be detached. Lifting the right side of the display reveals another (!) secret screw.

Before you can depart the two halves, this cable has to be detached from the mainboard. It goes to the touchpad. Move the interlock upwards.

The bottom side can now be detached from the top side. They are connected by some handles only.

On the right the cable to the WLAN switch and on the left the cable to the speakers have to be detached.

Red circles: here the screws holding the mainboard have to be removed: Square: the cable to the fan has to be detached.

Here you can see how the display cable and the wireless LAN cable are pulled through a notch in the motherboard.

The plug for the monitor has to be detached and moved through the hole together with the WLAN cables. Finally the mainboard has to be lifted at the left side and is now freely accessible and parts can be changed, e.g. the CPU.

Other Resources

Disclaimer and Copyright

Warning: These instructions are given without any warranty. They don't have to be complete or correct. Don't do any of the following steps if you're not sure of what you're doing. You could damage your notebook and you WILL lose your warranty. Everything you do will be at your own risk.

All the pictures and explanations are a courtesy of Mr. Brestrich and have been (partly) modified by Werner Heuser. The pictures are put under GPL and CopyLeft.