the laptop has become the standard Computing platform for almost anyone who's mobile and that's mostly because you're able to fit so much technology into such a small place but there is a trade-off when it comes to troubleshooting or dealing with these very small components inside of a laptop computer it is built to very precise specifications and therefore it requires a very precise form of troubleshooting you'll find that certain laptops are much easier to work on than others some have been engineered so that you can get inside of the system and replace memory or storage devices other laptops are built so that it's very difficult to gain access to the inside of that device and even more difficult to be able to swap out some of those components for that reason you'll find that different laptop manufacturers will have very different processes for managing and troubleshooting their particular systems a good example of this is how different laptop manufacturers might handle batteries with some laptops the batteries are very modular and can be removed from the laptop and replaced with a different battery very very easily other laptops have the battery built into the system and it's not designed to be swapped out by the user this may make it very difficult if you have to swap out a battery that's in a system that is not designed for a modular battery replacement you'll generally find two different types of batteries being used in our laptops one is a lithium ion and the other is a lithium ion polymer both of these are designs that they don't have the traditional memory effect that we had with older battery technologies this means you can recharge the battery at any time and not worry that you're affecting the overall capacity of that particular battery you'll also find that different manufacturers use different types of battery form factors this means that if you need a battery for your laptop you need to make sure that you're getting exactly the right battery for that specific laptop model you'll find that if you grab a laptop battery from a different make model that it's not going to fit into the battery slot of your laptop with modular batteries it's very easy for the enduser to be able to remove and replace the batteries inside of that laptop usually they have a button that you can press that will pop out One battery and then you can slide another battery directly into that same slot if the battery is built into the laptop itself this type of modularity is not available and usually you would have to have a tech completely take apart the laptop just to replace the battery if you've maintained a group of laptops then you know one of the most used components on that laptop is the keyboard This commonly means that the keyboard is probably going to be swapped out more than any other component on that particular device fortunately most laptop manufacturers make this process relatively easy you can usually remove a bezel on the laptop or a few screws and the laptop keyboard will pop out as a single unit it very often is connected to the system board of the laptop using a ribbon cable there's usually a connector on the end that allows you to easily disconnect and then reconnect a new keyboard if you do have a user that is having problems with their laptop keyboard or you'd like to perform some Diagnostics of that keyboard you could plug in an external USB keyboard to see what the results might be this might allow you to work around problems that may exist in the laptop's primary keyboard and it can also help you troubleshoot whether the problem is with the hardware of the keyboard itself or with the operating system inside of the laptop laptop keyboards are designed to be compact so that you can fit everything that would be on a regular size keyboard inside of a very small space often there will be special keys available such as a Windows keys or a function key that can be used simultaneously with other keys on the laptop to perform secondary functions and if the laptop is wide enough you may find there's enough room to have numeric keypad built into the laptop itself extending the functionality of this portable platform you may find that the problem you're having is not with the entire keyboard but only with one key or key cap on the keyboard this means that you may need to replace a single key on that keyboard on desktop systems these keys are relatively robust you can work with them to remove a key cap and replace the key cap relatively easily but on a laptop these keys are often very fragile schule and you have to take special care to make sure that you don't damage the keys as you are replacing them make sure you follow the instructions from the manufacturer so that you don't damage anything that may be underneath that key cap there are different components that are used across different laptop keyboards and as you can see it's a very delicate device that could be very easily damaged so make sure you follow those instructions you'll have no problem replacing that keyboard component because laptops obviously have a relatively smaller form factor than something we would use on a desktop that means that we also have the internal components with a smaller form factor an example of this would be the memory that we use inside of our laptop which is a smaller form factor than what you would find on a traditional desktop motherboard we refer to this dual inline memory module in a laptop as a small outline dual inline memory module or sodm on laptops that use these sodm modules it's very easy to moove the module and replace it with a new one but not all laptops provide this level of modularity you may find that the memory in your laptop is soldered to the motherboard and is not in this modular form that means that you would have to replace the entire system board if you need to upgrade the memory of that system to add or replace memory inside of one of these systems there's usually a place where you can open up a window into the back of the laptop remove any memory that might be there or add additional memory in into the slots that are available once you push down on that particular module it locks in place with clips that are on the motherboard and that memory is now upgraded inside of that laptop just as our desktop computers have a place where we can store operating system files and user documents we have the same requirement for our laptop computers many of our older laptops will use a traditional hard drive or spinning drive that has platters to be able to store that information on desktop computers you may have seen 3 and 1/2 in drives being used for storage and on laptops because they are a smaller form factor you'll find a smaller storage device and that is a 2 and 1/2 in hard drive but these days we have rapidly moved away from a spinning drive inside of a laptop computer to a much faster and much more reliable SSD or solid state drive a solid state drive is simply memory and it has no moving Parts at all this allows us to have very fast access to this memory and also provides additional reliability because we don't have to worry about that spinning Drive failing on a laptop device on older laptops you may see the SSD in that same 2 and 1/2 in form factor but newer laptops tend to have an m.2 interface which provides a much smaller form factor on the system board this also makes it a much easier installation because we simply need to plug in that m.2 interface to be able to have access to the data and to power up the drive itself with the older 2 and 1/2 in form factor there were two separate connections one for data and one for power here's a good example of both of these storage Drive types the 2 and 1/2 in form factor is on the left and the m.2 interface is on the right you can see that you have a much smaller form factor for the m.2 over the 2 and 1/2 in which makes it very attractive for laptops and other mobile devices on some laptops replacing the 2 and 1/2 in storage drive or an m .2 Drive can be relatively easy there may be a cover on the back of the laptop that you can remove you take out a couple of screws on the drive and you're able to remove that drive very easily installing an m.2 Drive is often easier because there is a single screw where you can install and fasten down that particular m.2 Drive here's how easy it is to install an m.2 interface you simply slide in the m.2 interface card it goes into a specific slot that is on the m.2 interface itself you push it in so that it's able to get a good connection with none of this copper showing once you have it connected and then you can push it down and screw it into the system board so that it will stay in place installing or replacing a 2 and 1/2 in formfactor drive is relatively easy there are usually a couple of screws that you can remove this technician is using a special pad that allows them to save those very tiny screws into this little area and then once they have that they can simply pull it out of the interface and now your Drive is free to add another drive back you simply reverse the process and once you're done installing either the 2 and 1/2 in drive or the m.2 drive you can replace the cover on the top and your installation is done many users with older laptops may want to replace the spinning hard drive that's inside of that laptop with a solid state drive not only is this a more reliable form of storage it also is a much faster form of storage it's almost like upgrading getting a brand new laptop just by replacing a single component you could certainly install a brand new operating system on the SSD and then manually transfer all of the user documents from one device to the other and then install any of the applications that they need to use this is obviously much more timec consuming than backing up everything that's on the original drive and copying it over to the new SSD to be able to do that easily we may want to use specialized software this is usually referred to as imaging software or cloning software because we are creating an exact duplicate of the data from one storage drive to the new one many SSD manufacturers recognize this is a very common task and they will include imaging software with the SSD itself you could also use thirdparty software like the one you see here to be able to copy everything from one drive or one partition into a new drive or a new Partition sometimes this requires you to create an entire image of the system and you store that image on a separate storage device then you would install your new drive and then copy everything from that image back to the new drive to do this even faster you may be able to install both the old drive and the new drive at the same time and use that same imaging software to Simply image from one device to the other in real time many laptops today don't even have a separate wired network connection on the laptop itself to be able have any connectivity to the rest of the world that laptop uses some type of wireless connection such as 802.11 or Bluetooth the wireless components that provide you with this connectivity are usually on the motherboard itself but older laptops may have separate interface cards that provide this Wireless connectivity for example you may be using 802.11 for your local area network wireless connections inside of a building and there may be a mini PCI or a mini PCI Express card that provides that 802.11 functionality you can see that these cards are designed to be modular so you can install and uninstall them from the laptop system board these cards often have small connectors on them that you plug in the wireless antennas that are already built into your laptop Bluetooth is often used as a short range network communication and you'll often see it referred to as a pan or a personal area network Bluetooth allows you to connect an external Mouse an external keyboard or any other type of peripheral often they are provided with separate interface cards but most newer laptops also have this Bluetooth functionality built into the laptop system board itself installing these modular cards is very similar to the process of installing additional memory modules onto the system board there's very often a panel that you can remove on the back of the laptop and there'll be a place where you can install that particular component once you place the card in the laptop it usually locks down into the laptop with connectors that are built into the interface and in this particular case it's an 802.11 card so you'll need to also connect the wireless antenna wires you can see them down here with the gray and the black wire and they will connect to these smaller connectors on the interface card itself many of these 802.11 interfaces whether they are on the system board itself or an external card will usually have two separate connectors one of them is a main connector and the other is an auxiliary connector you might also find a third antenna being used for all of your Bluetooth connections these antenna wires commonly wrap around the outside of the display itself this allows you to get those antenna wires as high as possible when you open up the screen of your laptop and if you've ever replaced a laptop screen you'll notice that the antenna wires are coming right out of the bottom of that screen so that you can then connect them to the existing antenna connectors on your system board if you were to follow those wires you'd see that they would probably go behind your keyboard to the the system board itself where they are connecting to the 802.11 and the Bluetooth antenna connectors many of our modern Operating Systems Support authentication to our laptop using methods other than a password for example you may have the option to use Biometrics to be able to unlock or gain access to your laptop computer these Biometrics allow you to use a fingerprint or face recognition which means that this laptop will only be available if you've configured your face or your fingerprint for that laptop operating system this means that you'll need an operating system that is able to use these biometric features and you'll need the biometric Hardware to be able to take advantage of that function this means that you may need a fingerprint reader on the laptop itself or you may need a webcam or camera built into the laptop that's able to do face recognition this type of biometric authentication has become relatively secure in recent years and you'll often find that using a face ID or some other type a fingerprint reader is a very secure way to lock down your laptop computer for example if you're running the Windows operating system there are two biometric functions available for authentication there's Windows hello face which is face recognition and windows hello fingerprint which allows you to use a fingerprint reader you may want to look at your laptop and see if you have one of those fingerprint readers built into the hardware itself so that you can use that as additional authentication into your laptop computer if you if you've ever paid for something at a point of sale terminal using your phone or your Smartwatch then you were using a network type known as NFC or near field communication NFC is a very short range networking function so usually you have to be relatively close often 4 cm or less just to be able to use that function and of course we can use NFC for more than just purchases at a point of sale terminal we can use this on a hospital workstation so that any nurse that walks up to the work station is able to authenticate using their access card or their NFC device this is also used for warehouses manufacturing shipping and receiving and anywhere that you may need to easily authenticate wirelessly if you have a laptop and you've used it to be in a meeting then you've probably taken advantage of the camera that is often built into the laptop itself it's usually right in the center at the very top of the screen this not only allows you to capture video to a file but you can also use it for real-time video on things like a video conference call on most laptops not only will you have the camera right in the middle but often there is a microphone to the left and right so that you're able to not only show the video but people are able to hear exactly what you're saying these built-in cameras are certainly convenient and allow you to use this functionality without carrying around any other equipment but if you find you need additional functionality or a higher definition camera you may want to use an external camera and attach it to the top of your laptop display