Taking Our Computer Apart

A few weeks ago we played with some electronics. We wrote about it here. Now we wanted to see what electronics looked like in things people use every day, so we found a computer to take apart.

Here is a picture of it with an iPod and a special wrench we had to buy to open the case of the computer.

A computer, an iPod and a special wrench,

The first thing we did was take off the battery. This was easy because you could undo it with a coin.

Taking off the battery.

The battery was heavy!

The computer battery.

Next we looked at the small screws to see what size torq bit we needed (that’s the name of the thing that undoes the screws).

Choosing the torq bit.

Once we had the right torq bit it was time to undo some screws.

Undoing the screws.

We also took some screws out on the top of the computer to see what the back of the screen looked like.

Looking at the back of the screen.

When we turned the computer around we saw that the screen was joined to the rest of the computer with wires.

Connecting wires.

Inside the back of the screen we saw that the wires from the computer joined up to a circuit board at the top. Circuit boards have lots of really tiny electronics on them that make the computer work.

Wires connected to the circuit board.

We decided to look at other parts of the computer. It was easy to take the keyboard off.

The keyboard.

The keyboard was very light and thin. After we’d taken it off we were able to look inside the bottom of the computer. We saw something called an AirPort Card. This is what helps our computer connect to the internet through the air (this is called wifi).

The AirPort card.

We talked about how we connect to the internet. It comes in through the telephone line. We wanted to see how the telephone line got to our house so we looked out of the window.

Telephone lines.

The computer, electricity, wifi and the internet all help us to tell you about what we’re doing! Next time we’ll take apart the iPod.