The narrow part of the trackpad ribbon closest to the motherboard is anchored to the trackpad chassis with gentle adhesive which needs to be prised free.

You can work the ribbon free from the connector by pulling alternately on the shoulders of the wider part.

My trackpad connector was not quite the same as my keyboard connector, but more or less the same. The ribbon connector with its 21+20 contacts (!) slides out parallel to the trackpad surface in the direction of the motherboard. Be careful with the wider, stiffer portion of the ribbon closest to the connector – it's actually a tiny circuit board with 4 ICs and lots of other small stuff!

There’s a very easy way to avoid cross-threading a screw thread, any size.

Put the screw into its hole and start by turning it gently, slowly BACKWARDS. When you hear a little “Click!” sound, the male thread has just passed the opening in the female thread and is in exactly the right position to enter into it correctly when you start to turn in the correct forward direction.

Remember, all drivers except hex (Allen key) and TorX need pressure to avoid slipping out and damaging the head. So even when you want to turn it in with LOW moment/torque, keep the CONTACT PRESSURE high.

If your vision, like mine, is getting too fuzzy to be able to distinguish between a tiny Phillips screwdriver and a tiny Tri screwdriver, there’s an easy way. With a Phillips (or a Pozidrive) you can get two opposite wings to reflect the light from a lamp or window straight towards your eye at the same time. With a Tri (or Penta) you can only get one wing to reflect at a time, however much you twiddle it.

Two of the three plastic screw eyelets on my old battery were broken - I guess someone had dropped the computer at some time. So these two little bits of black plastic fell down into the Unibody when I lifted the battery out. I’m glad I saw them so they didn’t rattle around and cause trouble later on!

WARNING!

When I lifted my dead battery out, I saw two old 3 mm Phillips case screws lying loose in the bottom of the Unibody. I lifted them out using the magnetism of the Phillips #00 screwdriver.

On gently shaking the case I could hear that there was another loose item still in there somewhere, so I carefully turned the laptop over to have it fall out – and the whole hard disk fell out, though it remained hanging by its cable! I discovered that the two screws holding the retaining strip (that runs the whole length of the hard disk between it and the DVD unit) had been completely loose!

Nothing broke, but it was a nasty surprise!

I had bought this machine second-hand as factory refurbished with twelve months guarantee – and gotten three old case screws and a nasty surprise for free! Apart from that, I’ve been really pleased with it.