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Upgrade your Winbook A210 In the process of repairing the power connector on my Winbook A210 laptop I discovered more upgrade possibilities than were possible from accessing the motherboard from the bottom panel. Here are some simple upgrades anyone could do (if they are careful and don't care about their warranty). *DISCLAIMER* I'm not responsible if you break your laptop or void your warranty in the process of following these directions. I am describing my observations and results. Your results may vary. Turning OFF the Power You SHOULD turn off the computer, unplug the power, and remove the battery before opening it up. This reduces the possibility of destroying something if you just happen to drop a screw in the wrong place, or decide to touch everything metallic with a screwdriver. If you look closely at my images you notice the laptop is actually on while taking them, but being a EE does have its benefits (i.e. I know what I'm doing, usually). Removing the Keyboard The hidden areas are under the keyboard. There are six tabs holding the keyboard in place around the outside. They are marked in the image below:
These tabs can be pushed in with a small flathead screwdriver (be careful to push them in while not pushing down on the keyboard assembly so that the keyboard will pop up once the tab is released - there is some tension on the keyboad so most of them will pop up easily. I had some trouble with the bottom right and right edge tab so I used a second small screwdriver to pry up gently on the plastic piece that was not a key by the arrow keys as shown:
Don't pry on the keys - they may pop off and in the process break the mechanism, or at best you have to try to get the key reassembled (I've done this on another laptop and it is not fun). The top of the keyboard is hinged, so if you start with the bottom four tabs and move your way to the sides it will swing upward and you can pull it off to reveal the hidden service panel:
Remove the four screws on the panel (the others to the left don't need to be removed) and this panel will swing upward (tabs at the bottom) to reveal the hidden "built-in" memory slot and the internal mini-PCI slot where the wireless LAN card normally goes:
My image already has my wireless LAN card in place, yours will be empty if your Winbook didn't come with wireless LAN from the factory. Luckily these days it is cheaper to make a bunch of boards with support for these features and then just not make them accessible to the user than to make a customized non-wireless model. What this means is all the electronics on the motherboard (except the expansion card) and the dual antennae are available for use. Install Wireless LAN You should find a black and grey wire taped down in the channel in the middle (shown connected and taped in place here) and running to the left under the grey panel. Pull them out and remove the plastic covers, connect them to the card of your choice (I chose an Intel card from Newegg), slide it in the mini-PCI slot, replace the tape holding the wires in the channel, and you're done! (You may want to replace the panels, screws, and keyboard too before you consider yourself really done.)
The laptop even has support for the enable/disable switch and indicator. When the laptop is powered, press the wireless button and the wireless LED should light to indicate that wireless is enabled. Upgrade the "Internal" Memory It appears that the internal memory can also be upgraded at least up to 512MB, since it is simply a 256MB DIMM and the other slot accepts up to 512MB memory. I haven't tried upgrading this yet, so upgrade at your own risk:
So there you go. Nothing fancy really, but as a normal user you may never know about these upgrade possibilities. Now go upgrade!
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