Hi all, I write this message in hopes of finding a local hardware guy who is good at working on the internals of laptops. I have a presario 700 with the dreaded hinge problem, the display will not stand up; it falls right over and you have to put books behind it to get it to stand up.. also, the athlon 1600+ never should have been put in there by compaq, it puts out enough heat to keep me warm in january, so every time i compile something big it just shuts off. I know I need to get some better thermal paste on the cpu, but again, I really don't want to try to open it myself... desktops, sure i'll rip any one apart, but laptops... especially ones that are still somewhat usuable / worth some money... i am not so sure I want to rip that apart. So, if anyone out there has experience with laptop repair or modification, please get back to me, hopefully we can work out something. Compaq wants more than it's worth just to fix the hinges, and that wouldn't fix the thermal paste problem anyway... Nick http://npt.ath.cx "all unix, all the time."