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This guide will help you take apart a Sony Vaio Z1 series notebook. In this notebook all so-called user replaceable parts such as memory module, hard drive, DVD drive, etc… are hidden under the top cover making them hard to access or even find.
For cleaning the cooling fan and heat sink or replacing the memory module, all you have to do is remove the keyboard. You don’t have to disconnect the keyboard from the motherboard, simply lift it up and place upside down on the palm rest. The keyboard is secured to the notebook base by two screws marked “D” on the picture 1. You should be able to lift up the keyboard after you remove these two screws.
You can clean the cooling module with compressed air. There is only one memory expansion slot in this model and it will take a memory module up to 512MB (DDR226/PC2100).
If you want to replace the hard drive, CR-RW/DVD-ROM drive or wireless card, you’ll have to remove the top cover as it shown on the picture 7.
September 7th, 2012 at 9:23 pm
Ok, I finally figured out I needed to remove the motherboard to remove the cpu fan. The next problem is that my replacement CPU fan did not come with the thin metal bracket attached to the heat fins. The old one is attached with double sided aluminum tape. Any idea where I can buy some of this (I live in a major metro area in the USA)? Ideally I’d like to buy a small amount and not a huge expensive roll of it.
September 7th, 2012 at 7:32 pm
Help? I have an old PCG-Z1RAP that has a noisy/rattly CPU fan. I have a replacement fan here purchased off of Ebay but can’t figure out how the spring loaded connectors are supposed to release the heat slug from the CPU. Are special tools required? This looks quite foreboding.
June 1st, 2011 at 11:16 pm
@ Chris – the laptop tech doesn’t know wtf he is talking about….the issue you are experiencing is due to an incompatible wireless driver from INTEL. Everytime I would turn on wireless my comp would BSOD ….so much so that it corrupted XP to the point where I would constantly BSOD w and w/out turning on wireless. It drove me crazy. Even worse, the fools at SONY didn’t even acknowledge or fix the problem ….I guess they don’t expect their laptops to be around for 6 years +. I ended up installing 4 different versions of the INTEL pro/set driver until I found the right one. I would let you know which but I don’t have it in front of me.
July 12th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Bob,
Having not bothered to look at things for a while, today I baked my motherboard for 7 mins at gas mark 6 which has fixed the graphics card problem.
Best of luck
Stephen
July 2nd, 2010 at 3:53 pm
i was reading this and you guys said that they will only take up to 512 ram in that slot but i have a pcg-z1wamp with 1.5 gb of ram,built in 512mb and 1gb pc-2700 that it reads and accepts
June 29th, 2010 at 6:03 am
Replacing a laptop hard drive – Help!
Model: Sony Vaio PCG-Z1MP
I’m using this model with a 40 GB HD and I would like to replace it with better one.
I have two questions -
1. All 2.5″ hard drive will work on this model – e.g. 320GB or 500GB?
2. How can I reinstall original factory software from the old hard drive (the new drive will be new from the box, with no software installed on it)
thanks in advance.
March 3rd, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Chris,
Maybe the wireless card is going bad? You can try uninstalling the wireless card drivers in Safe Mode and after that restart the laptop in normal mode. Will it work?
March 3rd, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Thanks for the advice, I checked hard drive by installing Knoppix and it all works fine, so I assume neither the hard drive nor the motherboard or graphics are faulty. I’ve noticed something though; as soon as I disable the wireless from the switch below the monitor, the xp loads okay. However, as soon as I connect the wireless. the blue screen of death reappears. Could it be that I found the problem? What can cause the wireless switch to damage the system in such a dramatic way? Thanks.
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:56 am
Chris,
It’s possible you have a faulty hard drive.
You can try booting your laptop from a Live Linux CD. I use Knoppix and here’s a good explanation how to boot your laptop with Knoppix CD:
http://www.datarecoverytutorial.com/how-to-recover-files-from-laptop-with-crashed-windows/
If the laptop works fine with Knoppix, I would assume the motherboard and video card works properly.
It’s possible you have a bad hard drive. Try testing it with Hitachi’s drive fitness test. It works fine for most hard drives.
March 3rd, 2010 at 5:16 am
I have the pcg-z1va and it first started to give me randomly blue screens of death. Lately however, as soon as windows xp loads, the blue screen appears and the laptop restarts. I can only access the xp in safe mode, where it can stay on for hours or days. As soon as I try to load windows normally, I’lI get the screen of death. The error that keeps appearing is ‘irql not less or equal’. I tested if for memory errors with Memtest86 and it gives me no errors. Last resort, I decided to use the Vaio recovery cds to reinstall the system on the C drive (thinking it was drivers error). The installation worked until disk 3, when I’m asked to restart the machine to finish the installation. Obviously (in hindsight) this cannot be completed because the blue screen appears and pc restarts. What’s worse, if I load it in safe mode I get the message ‘installation not complete’ so it asks me to complete installation: impossible! I’m left with a half installed xp and no way of fixing the blue screen error. Am I right these symptoms indicate a hardware failure, motherboard or graphics? How could I test and find this out? Thanks.