My son did 99 percent of the work. This guide was great. Watch for the little plastic airflow grill thing falling off the shell after you remove the shell. There’s no mention of it in the directions, but we ended up with this thing on the table when all was reassembled!
The screw in the middle of everything was hardest for me to reinstall because it has to hold the CD drive in place ,and that drive hole must line up with everything else _just right_. Also, prying the keyboard from the shell was harder than I expected. It’s snapped in there pretty tight.
Probably 5 should be 3. Some shrink tubing is small enough to grip the cord well but won’t slide over the mag end easily if at all. That’s the tradeoff making you fatten the cord up a bit.
Takes under an hour, especially if you've done this before and have some practice with the cables. Under 2 hours if you count driving to Best Buy and back to get the replacement HD.
It looks to me like there's nothing you can do to these little "black box" ports except make sure the tab for the headphone port is pressed down enough to contact an inserted headphone jack. Otherwise you'll want to get a replacement part. http://www.powerbookmedic.com/Intel-iMac... is one place I found online that seems to carry it. Thankfully it's not too pricey.
You can use one hand to hold the edge up while reaching with the other hand to disconnect cables. You may want to have a prop handy (like a small book) or an extra person to hold the edge up while you disconnect cables.
