HP ZBook 15 G4 Refurbishment/Upgrade Project

[Will]

Another one for the collection. Same old story: one day I was mindlessly scrolling through OLX out of boredom and stumbled upon this machine for sale. It was listed as defective and "for parts", not turning on, but the screen, graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro M1000M 2GB), keyboard, and battery (health unknown) had been tested and were working perfectly. Looking at the exterior, the chassis is pretty badly damaged, as you can see in the photos below. Even so, I figured it would be a good deal for the price, whether to restore it or sell off the working parts. I decided to restore and upgrade it, so I'll be posting the progress of this project in this topic. One final note: this laptop is originally a 15 G3 (with an i7-6820HQ), but I'll be turning it into a 15 G4 by swapping out the motherboard.

Here are the listing photos taken by the seller:






And here’s a photo of the internals:



Signs of attempted repair: