First things first, you’re going to need a small Philips size #1 screwdriver in order to remove the screws on this HP ZD7000 laptop.
Precautions: Make sure your laptop is not plugged in and your battery is removed. Also I am NOT going to be held responsible if you damage your laptop using this tutorial. I highly suggest if you’re not sure of what you’re doing or have never really done this before then to not attempt this and take it to a professional.
As you can see in the picture below, there are eight screws total that you need to remove from the underside of the laptop.
Remove 8 screws
You may need a tad bit of elbow juice to remove that plate. Under there is the processor’s heat sink and fan.
One thing I notice amongst many clients’ laptops is that under this plate is extremely dusty and dirty. I would suggest, since you’ve now got open access to this area to clean it up with a can of compressed air and maybe a brand new small paint brush to brush out that hard to reach areas.
In this next picture you’ll see that we have loosen four screws.
Loosen four screws
Once you loosen the four screws you will gently pull up on the heat sink. Be careful as more often than not the processor gets stuck to the heat sink. Be extremely gentle as you do not want to pull it out at a weird angle and then bend all of the processor pins.
Below you will see what it looks like once you have the heat sink removed.
Unleash latch and remove processor
Once you pull the latch up, the processor can be removed.
In my previous post I said you can pretty much use any P4 processor that has the markings of: CPU speed/512/800.
The processor I pulled out of this unit was a 3.2GHz CPU and I put in a 3.0GHz CPU and it worked fine.
Good luck and please if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them here.