Asus LaptopAsus X502CA

Asus X502CA Disassembly

In this guide, I’ll explain how to disassemble Asus X502CA to remove and replace the battery, hard drive, heat sink, wireless card, cooling fan, and motherboard.

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Remove all screws from the bottom case.

Turn over the laptop, pry up the palm rest with a pry bar.
Lift up the palm rest, disconnect keyboard cable and touchpad cable, you can remove the palm rest.

Here are palm rest and keyboard

When the palm rest removed, you can get access to the battery, hard drive, speaker, USB board and motherboard.
Remove four screws securing the battery, unplug the battery connector from the motherboard, lift up and remove the battery.

The laptop comes with a 5136mah, 38wh Li-polymer battery, Asus P/N: C21-X502.

Remove four screws securing the hard drive module, sliding it to the left.

Asus X502CA comes with an HGST 500GB 5400RPM hard drive.

Now disconnect all cables from the motherboard.

Disconnect two wireless card antenna cables.

Remove all screws securing the motherboard, lift up and remove the motherboard from the base.
On the other side of the motherboard, you can access the wireless card, CMOS battery, heat sink and cooling fan.
The 4GB RAM is soldering on the motherboard.

Remove one screw securing the wireless card.

The laptop featured an AZUREWAVE AR5B125 wireless card.

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15 Comments

    1. I’m having exactly the same issue. New keyboard works perfectly but no apparent way to reattach it to the case. I’m thinking glue at this point 🙁 !!

    2. I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now, but for anyone new….

      I pried up the edge of the keyboard from the back until the little plastic button popped off. There’s no way to remove the keyboard without destroying all the little plastic buttons that hold it in. There are a ton of them. I then used packing tape to hold the keyboard in place while reassembling. It makes the new keyboard a bit “bouncy” to type on, but it works. If you really want the original firmness, you’ll either have to spray the underside of the palmrest keyboard outline with strong glue (the spray glue used by automotive shops to hold up headliners is a good choice) and then carefully place the keyboard in. Otherwise, you have to buy the entire palmrest assembly in the proper color and replace the entire unit.

    1. You’ll have to remove the existing RAM and replace it with larger capacity DIMMs. I know this is an older post, but for anyone coming across it, perhaps it will help.

  1. I cannot find a close up video of how the keyboard and touch-pad cables actually fit into the connectors on the motherboard, is there anything available that shows how these connectors actually accept the ribbon cables and how the locking device works ?

    1. @Ken Stevens

      I followed the curves and creases of the existing ribbon cables to give me an impression of what side would go into the socket. They should “fall” naturally onto the required side for proper insertion. Though the slimmer ribbon for the keyboard should have the blue part of edge of the ribbon facing upward, like it were a handle to one would use if one were to want to pull it out from the socket.

      My observation is that the cables are of just enough length to be put into place. I began with the slimmer ribbon first and then put into the socket the wider ribbon.

      Use of tweezers may make things easier.

  2. please where is the RAM found? my pc won’t come on or even charge so i wanna check the ram but i don’t know its location

  3. question with this particular model – is the keyboard replaceable? looks like it is plastic-glued permanently, you have to crack those plastic to remove the keyboard…question is, how can i stick new keyboard if i already cracked the plastic pins? another one is putting a built in RAM, everything here is a result of poor engineering…i hope they stop on doing this.

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