I've now had both of my A110's apart, and read/watched several of these guides both before and after my disassembly experience. There are three points to make about this article.
1) Removing the keyboard is, as usual in these guides, given a very short description. In fact it seems to be the item that gives most people problems. The trick is to use a flat blade to push back one tab, while simultaneously slipping a credit-card (or similar plastic item) between the edge of the case and keyboard. This makes the keyboard assembly pop past the first catch as it is depressed, and it will continue to push up on the assembly so it just pops out as you depress the next two catches.
2) I've never risked using a screwdriver between the case edges. My fingernails, slid into the join and gently run around it until the pieces pop apart, have always done the job without breaking or scratching anything.
3) You forgot to mention that the SSD has to be disconnected! (It's a similar connector to the keyboard/trackpad, so no great mystery)
Adding a gig of ram to these machines is a great way to spice them up. And if you have the skillz it brings another advantage... As standard the machine has 1/2 a gig of ram, and 1Gig of SSD used as swap (Oh, the humanity! swap on a SSD is not at all clever).
So once you have upgraded the ram, if you know how, boot from a USB stick with gparted on it and remove the swap partition (backup first!). Then expand the main partition and filesystem to fill that space. Bingo! your system still has the same total amount of memory as before (and it's all ram now) plus you have another gig of SSD available. On a 8G model this is really handy.
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Three things!
I've now had both of my A110's apart, and read/watched several of these guides both before and after my disassembly experience. There are three points to make about this article.
1) Removing the keyboard is, as usual in these guides, given a very short description. In fact it seems to be the item that gives most people problems. The trick is to use a flat blade to push back one tab, while simultaneously slipping a credit-card (or similar plastic item) between the edge of the case and keyboard. This makes the keyboard assembly pop past the first catch as it is depressed, and it will continue to push up on the assembly so it just pops out as you depress the next two catches.
2) I've never risked using a screwdriver between the case edges. My fingernails, slid into the join and gently run around it until the pieces pop apart, have always done the job without breaking or scratching anything.
3) You forgot to mention that the SSD has to be disconnected! (It's a similar connector to the keyboard/trackpad, so no great mystery)
Adding a gig of ram to these machines is a great way to spice them up. And if you have the skillz it brings another advantage... As standard the machine has 1/2 a gig of ram, and 1Gig of SSD used as swap (Oh, the humanity! swap on a SSD is not at all clever).
So once you have upgraded the ram, if you know how, boot from a USB stick with gparted on it and remove the swap partition (backup first!). Then expand the main partition and filesystem to fill that space. Bingo! your system still has the same total amount of memory as before (and it's all ram now) plus you have another gig of SSD available. On a 8G model this is really handy.