Compaq Presario V4000

Construction: Upgrading and Maintenance A Look Inside...

The display cannot swivel on a complete 180 degree plane. It stops approximately 35 degrees from being completely parallel.

The front bezel can be removed once four screws holding it down from the bottom of notebook are removed. (They are marked by a small triangle icon.) Once they are unscrewed, the front bezel can be popped off by putting a flat head screwdriver into a small slot between the keyboard and the bezel. You need to be careful here as the bezel flips forwards to loosen then backwards to expose four screws holding the keyboard down. Once they are removed, the front bezel needs to be flipped upright, back towards the monitor, so that the keyboard can be slipped up and out. After that the front bezel can be unplugged and removed. There really is nothing to access here for you, unless you want to clean out the keyboard.

Removing the bottom access panel gives way to reveal two SODIMM memory banks, miniPCI slot, hard drive, and CPU heatsink. The sample we have here came populated with 2 x Hynix 512MB DDR 333/PC2700. Interestingly, Compaq has chosen to implement the single channel DDR design of the 915 chipset series. This is the first notebook design we have in the labs to use such a design, since most manufacturers usually take the trade of using a single low power memory module in a DDR2 design, effectively limiting performance to single channel. The difference is that DDR is cheaper so that larger memory configurations can be used, but future iterations of the V4000 will have to undergo a motherboard refresh if Compaq wants to enable DDR2 support.

The hard drive can be removed by pulling the white string loop and lifting up and out. You can't just directly lift out, because Compaq is using a drive tray lock in design.

The CPU can be accessed if you remove the four screws holding down the heatsink. We should note that the access panel for the CPU uses a hex screw, not the typical Philips screw.