Firstly, out comes the battery. just a lock and a switch much like modern laptops which still have a replaceable batteries.

The broken left mouse button on my machine also gets removed since the sellotape holding it in would probably annoy me later.

Two phillips 0 screws hold down the panel hiding the hard drive from view.

It is a Seagate 40GB model which appears user upgradeable... It's even mounted to a quick-release drive caddy.

Attempting to free the drive from the cage we find the first warranty sticker. All this means is I'm headed in the right direction!

Two annoying screws later and the drive slips free of its hot-swap cage.

Only a single screw this time... and we're in.

W e are greeted with a 256MB DDR SODIMM. This could have been upgraded to 1GB back in the day.

One of the screws here is screwed into a cracked hole in the panel. I guess living with two young children, as my brother and I were at the time, will have taken its toll.

The intake fan is remarkably clean given the amount of use... I can remember this thing howling under a heavy load.

Many screws hold the bottom panel tohether, inclusing one deeply set in the plastic, requiring a long-shaft screwdriver.

One of the screws holding the optical drive in place needed to be drilled out since it would not come loose.

Unfortunately something wouldn't budge and I was not able to pull the cover off any further with my (lack of) expertise. Don't worry there's still one more thing of interest.

After removing the heatsink we get to see the CPU - an intel celeron M350 clocked at 1.34 GHz.

It has an unusual screw-actuated lock, which can be released to allow the CPU to be removed.