iFixit

The left speaker assembly is next to go.

A twist of the screwdriver and the Z1 goes back to old-school mono.

Removing the screws around the internal USB port frees the rear I/O board, on which we found:

• Display In/Out
• Ethernet Port
• S/PDIF
• Four USB 2.0
• Audio Ports and Subwoofer

Round two of speaker removal is no sweat for our screwdriver.

We're going to guess that removing the speakers probably ruins the nicely engineered SRS Premium Sound.

We're getting down to some serious deconstruction now. A few SATA connectors come out and the hard drive bracket is free.

• These SATA cables connect the single or double hard drives to the motherboard.

Next up is the hard drive thermal sensor, which doesn't put up much of a fight.

• Rather than taking Apple's approach, who changed their SATA connectors to a proprietary 7-pin design and embedded the thermal sensor inside the hard drive, HP is sticking with an upgrade-friendly design with standard SATA sockets and a thermal sensor that's mounted on the computer's internal frame.

Next up: the side I/O board. This board is home to:

• 4-in-1 media card reader
• Firewire port
• Two blue USB 3.0 ports
• Headphone / mic ports

Just a couple more connectors, and the motherboard comes out.

But before we can take out the mobo, we've got to remove Intel's 6230 Bluetooth/WiFi card, which is held in place by two T6 Torx screws.

Attached to the power supply by an ATX connector, the motherboard is easier to remove than most logic boards.

So that's it for the bottom half of the computer. Now for the heavyweight LCD and glass.

Removing some conveniently-placed T15 screws is all it takes to remove the LCD and glass from the rest of the machine.

Despite the pile of screws left on the bench, we are relieved at the absence of our nemesis, adhesive, in HP's design.

One also has to remove about a dozen more screws to separate the glass and LCD, but hey -- they're the same-sized T15 screws, and the glass comes right off once the screws are removed! It's about as simple of a construction as it can get for a component that's this hefty.

We told HP that we were hosting a party, so they brought the chips:

• Intel Core i3-2120 Processor with Intel HD Graphics 2000
• Intel BD82C206 Platform Controller Hub
• ON NCP6151 CPU & GPU Controller
• Texas Instruments TUSB7320 SuperSpeed USB xHCI Host Controller
• IDT 92HD91B Audio Codec
• Texas Instruments DRV604 Line Driver & Headphone Amp
• MPS MP3399 LED Drivers