We are ‘teh awesome.’ Me and my VAIO I mean. If somebody ever needs to look up step by step guidelines on how to assemble/un-assemble a Sony VAIO (I might), here’s how. Just in case you ‘re wondering How my VAIO ended up like this, my VAIO died in the morning out of over-heating.

Here’s a step by step guide to start assembling the laptop. In case you need the other way round, start from the bottom.

The Problem: Clogged vents	The fan: Its the deepest component inside the VAIO. To reach it, everything needs to be pulled out.
The VAIO SZ491N motherboard. One would expect that for $3000 plus price tag, they would at least use Silver heat sink compound.	That was all in the laptop. And it looked pretty.
Heat pipe and the Vent; With grime clogged like this, no wonder the fan was running full speed	Same thing. After vacuuming
The Fan vents: Before	After
Thermal Compund removar and Surface Purifier. We’ll need this to clean the old thermal compound and add a fresh thermal compound (Silver – not ceramic nonsense)	The cleaned up Fan, back in its assembly
Motherboard with the NVIDIA Graphics chip. Yuck. Ceramic heat sink compound?  That too spread all over the place?	Same thing. Just cleaned up and purified.
The other side of the motherboard. Cleaned up Intel processor and Graphics chips.	Assembly Step 1: Fan and heat sink back on the motherboard
Assembly Step 2: Motherboard back onto the laptop rear base	Assembly Step 3: DC Power, WAN Antenna and USB Hookup
Assembly Step 4: Motherboard connectors, FPC etc	Assembly Step 5: EMI Shields
Assembly Step 6: Battery Cover	Assembly Step 7: Bluetooth, Main Chassis, Top control board
Assembly step 8: Bluetooth Module, Speakers and TPM	Assembly Step 9: The LCD panel
Assembly Step 10: Microphone, VGA, Camera FPC	Assembly Step 11: WAN , fingerprint sensor cables.
Assembly step 12: FBD. top bezel, switches	Assembly Step 13: HDD, Optical Drive back in place
Correction: The Right side panel and the network cover needs to go in before the Chassis Gaaawd	Assembly Step 14: the Palm rest and the Keyboard
Assembly Step 15: Memory and CPU cover back.	Alright, all set and ready to boot up, Fingers Crossed Power in, the fan definitely is much more silent now.
Doh…, the TPM isn’t working …	“We are teh awsome!”  Back to business.
Except of course the bit-locker. Will see some other time, maybe I missed a cable! For now, lets just decrypt the drive.	TPM isn’t working. The speakers are fine, the WLAN works fine, WWAN works fine, everything else checks out. The BIOS says TPM couldn’t even be detected. Gah!
And, just in case you wanted to see the difference temperatures Before.	Temperatures After

Update: 11/25/2008: As Anand Suggested, added the before and after temps above.

Dang, I wasted my entire Sunday on this. For now, I’m just too happy to be working on my VAIO again … If this post helped you in assembling/disassembling your VAIO, please do let me know in the notes. About the TPM, well, I’ll see some other time.