Summary: Laptop Barebones is not complicated, but knowing what goes where helps.

The ASUS sells the C90S as a barebones laptop, which is a great move for those of us who like to roll our own. However, the Manual available from ASUS is NOT a "How-To" manual. As an example of what's involved in setting up a bare-bones laptop, I wrote the following How-To as an example.

I think one of the positives for a barebones laptop is the ability to perform routine maintenance, such as cleaning dust from the heatsinks - trying this on some laptops involves a level of disassembly that turns into a daunting task. The back of the C90S:

The back plate comes off after removing only four screws - they are identified with the following symbol:

The four screws are located as shown in red:

Remove the screws, then SLIDE the back cover off by pushing it from the front towards the back - then you see this:

The C90S needs a videocard, so installing one is a necessary step. When the laptop is shipped without a videocard installed, the VGA area looks like this:

The heatsink you see here is for the northbridge chip. The videocard installs easily into the slot - as with RAM, it goes in at an angle:

Next take two small screws and while holding the videocard down against the screw posts, tighten the screws:

The two screws to hold the videocard in place are circled in red - the arrows point to the mounting holes for the VGA heatsink - it's the smaller one included in the parts that ship with the C90S. The VGA heatsink's base matches to top plate of the VGA card:

Line it up and similar to the CPU heatsink, wiggle it into place - it's in place when the three holes in the heatsink mate to the three holes in the videocard's top plate:

You'll find three spring-loaded screws in the parts packages - these are for the VGA heatsink.

Snug them down and that's it! The CPU and VGA heatsinks are the most difficult tasks - installing the hard drive and RAM will complete the build.