Ron,

Three comments.

1. Dell has gone to the dark side with the maintainability of its laptops. Downright horrific. Near complete disassembly to replace a hard drive is another one of my Dell peeves. Honestly, maintenance and repair of most modern Dell laptops really sucks.

2. If you swap the hard drive from the Vostro 1400 into another one, you may well need to reactivate any software that requires activation. If the Vostro 1400s have the same version of Windows sticker, that would be no problem unless you upgraded to Windows 7 or later. If the OS has a generic Dell Windows product key, activation may not even be necessary. And, of course, products like PhotoShop, Acrobat Pro etc would probably also need reactivation.

3, The Vostro 1400 uses an Intel 965 chipset, so the OS would boot and run on any system with the same chipset, e.g. Latitude D830, Latitude D630 and others. And, of course, there would still be the problem of activating Windows and other software... Ben Myers


On Tuesday, June 27, 2017 at 4:39:11 PM UTC-4, Ron Hardin wrote:
It turns out that you have to disassemble the
entire laptop to get at the cooling fan.

Step 25 remove cooling fan.

The odds of the machine working after that are
zero.
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On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.