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I live in a refurbished Thinkpad household. I use an X220 as my "daily driver" (lately it's sometimes been more like a "weekly driver", but whatever), while my wife has an X230. The X230 has been struggling against pretty severe overheating issues for a long time now. It doesn't get hot enough to cross any alarm thresholds, triggering a shutdown or anything like that, but it routinely gets way too hot to comfortably use on a lap. So, I finally took advantage of recent holiday downtime to replace the thermal paste on both CPUs and clean the fans out with compressed air. This was by far the most substantial laptop maintenance work I've done. Back in the Good Old Days (TM) of IDE and ISA and PCI, when RAM capacity and CPU clocks were strictly Megaunit affairs, I knew pretty well what I was doing when it came to PC internals, and my teenage bedroom often resembled one of those iconic scenes from Serial Experiments: Lain, but it's been a looong time and I'm well and truly out of the loop, hardware-wise. I didn't become a laptop user until quite late in life, and so I've just never done anything other than replace hard disks or RAM.
The X220 wasn't really having temperature problems of its own. But my wife is dependent on her X230 for freelance working from home, so I was really concerned about messing anything up while monkeying around deep inside. In contrast, my employer provides me with a work computer, so it's not a huge problem if my X220 is out of order for a little while (although I'd be quite upset if I managed to destroy it completely - this is the machine that both Circumlunar Space and Gemini were born on!). Therefore I figured I'd re-paste both machines, and do the X220 first as a kind of "learning experience", proceeding to the X230 if and only if the first effort went smoothly enough that I felt confident of success.
This turned out to be precisely the right course of action, because in fact I did mange (to my surprise!) to do some irreparable damage to the X220, and thereby acquired practical knowledge which allowed me to do a flawless job on the X230. Also surprisingly, it wasn't the actual thermal paste application part where I had problems. That went smoothly on both machines and both now have significantly reduced running temperatures, so the big picture is a success. Instead, I powered the X220 up to find everything working just fine except the WiFi card. This is a small MiniPCI Express card which slots into a socket on the motherboard and is then screwed down to the bottom of the laptop case. Because of that last detail, it's necessary to remove the WiFi card in order to be able to remove the motherboard, which is necessary because the heatsink is on the underside and otherwise inaccessible. At first I just figured I must not have reseated the WiFi card correctly when putting things back together, so I took it out again, wiped the contacts clean with isopropyl alcohol, puffed some air into the slot, re-inserted the card and booted up again, but still no dice. So I went back in and third time and took a much closer look, and that was when I was astonished to find what I'd done.
If you have the laptop sitting flat and upright, you cannot actually see the MiniPCI Express slot that the WiFi card goes into, as it is on the underside of the motherboard. Despite this you can insert and remove the card while the motherboard is in place and laptop is upright, due to the shape of the board (the slot is right up against an edge). The *correct* thing to do is to turn the laptop on its side (if you move the screen so it's at about a 90 degree angle to keyboard, then the whole thing will stand up very stably on its side). If you do this then you can clearly see the slot on the underside and it's very easy to gently and precisely insert the WiFi card exactly where it is supposed to go. What you *don't* want to do is just keep the laptop sitting flat and upright and try to insert the card blindly, figuring "hey, it's pretty clear where it's supposed to go, there's not enough *room* to be off by more than a centimetre, so if you just keep poking around with subtle shifts of angle it's sure to pop right in before long...".
Indeed, my card *did* pop right in eventually, but the none-to-careful technique meant that first I managed to (and I know it sounds crazy that this could be possible without resorting to obviously irresponsible levels of force, but I swear it wasn't difficult) scrape, for want of a better word, some of the slot's thin metal contacts free from its plastic "mouth", so that the eventual insertion crushed them down into the base of the slot. We are talking about strips of copper less than a millimetre wide and far less than that thick. I destroyed three adjacent contacts this way. As far as I can tell, nothing has actually physically broken, such that with really high magnification, good light and some kind of very fine manipulator tool connected to some kind of force-reducing control interface (you know, like what Automatic Jack has in Burning Chrome), it might be possible to straighten those contacts out and push them back into place and have things work (then again, maybe the crushing has shorted some neighbouring pins together and that's damaged a controller attached to the slot, who knows?). But, it's not remotely worth trying something so fiddly and frustrating; as a legacy of the early Raspberry Pi models, we live in a world awash with very small and very cheap USB WiFi adaptors with good Linux driver support, so I was very easily able to source a literal plug and play solution and now there's no long term consequences associated with this little stuff up. Still, it certainly doesn't feel good to have done *any* kind of lasting functional damage to a working machine.
Nevertheless, I'm really glad that I tried doing this and was for the most part successful. Getting to the heatsinks of these machines really requires a *complete* tear down. You are left with the bottom shell of the laptop completely empty. As such, I now feel very confident about doing *any* future maintenance or repairs on either of these machines, and that's a good, empowering feeling to have. Older model ThinkPads have a strong reputation for being very easy to work on. I can't really say with conviction that this is true, simply because I've never done a remotely comparable procedure on any other model of laptop for comparison, but I certainly can't imagine a laptop being considerably *easier* to work on. I was able to use just a single screwdriver for the whole procedure. All of the screws accessible from the outside of the laptop are black, and they are all the same size. All of the screws accessible from the inside of the laptop are silver, and they are all the same size. You don't need to touch any internal silver screws at all to replace the keyboard or the TouchPad (which can be replaced separately). Aah, actually, "just a single screwdriver" isn't true, the X220 (but not the X230) required a pair of needle-nosed pliers to remove the hex screws on either side of the VGA port. Absolutely no exotic tools are needed, let's put it that way. Aside from the VGA port screws, the two models tear down identically to one another, so if you're comfortable with one you can do the other, no problem. Very practical machines, all things considered.