Completely stuck with 2503 Advanced dock and Nvidia 1030

[farfignoogin]

Hey was looking at Goodwill site today. There is a 2503 advanced dock up for auction…starting at $4.99 plus shipping. I got mine already so just spreading the word!

[TRANTOR1972]

I played around with this docking station for a while. It is quite difficult to disassemble and assemble!
You can see here what's inside from the photos and the bad video I made!
https://youtu.be/dcZemkl_aAo
https://youtu.be/vsnAWgjL-08

[W500tragic]

I played around with this docking station for a while. It is quite difficult to disassemble and assemble!
You can see here what's inside from the photos and the bad video I made!
...

Hi Trantor1972 (hey is that a Asimov "Foundation" series reference ?),
thanks for the video and the TL:DR highlight version. I appreciate the video as to my knowledge there are no Technical manuals available for the 2503 Advanced Dock - these resources of yours might help to inspire other users to dig into their units for servicing and upgrade, and even for modding purposes.
*Perhaps* you could annotate the video with a brief description of each of the key components you handle? Examples might include the multi-card reader, the video card insertion around 42:00 etc - incidentally, this was the most difficult issue that I found when I stripped back and reassembled my unit - just couldn't seem to get my card (NVIDIA GeForce GT 710) playing nice with the metal shroud intruding into the "back" of the card bay, to enable adequate closure of the plastic bay cover. Had all sorts of short-circuit type issues I think, until I shaved back that shroud a little to give the card more room to fit nicely, and I hadn't any problems after that. Another tricky area was ensuring that the dock engaging mechanism (?) was in correct alignment when closing up - otherwise you couldn't use the dock properly afterwards as the laptop would not be able to clip into place correctly.
Others have mentioned fan unit removal and replacement to deal with unacceptable operational noises - I *was* on that path to have my unit running as close to silent as possible but as I note earlier in this thread a decent video card seems to suppress the effort the card has to make. Nice to see that you have the exhaust fan area well exposed in your video, should others see the need to replace the stock fan with a Pabst fan replacement etc as discussed elsewhere in the forum.
Another suggested annotation regards the replacement DVD dummy unit. In my setup I used the dvd multi-bay drive caddies for swapping additional SSDs' and HDD's for system backups etc for my W500 laptop. Bays not entirely hot-swappable between the 2503 and W500 of course, due to the latter's SATA interface and 9.5mm height requirements - but manageble with the earlier T60 and T61's that I have.

[Off-topic: Unfortunately, my 2503 currently in storage. I had been running Windows 10pro happily on the W500 with SSD, but in two automatic/enforced updates to around v. 20H1 several months ago I recall, I had drastic overheating problems and the poor old 2CoreDuo in the W500 refused to boot up into operation (maybe also the ext3 Linux partitions and dual-booting weren't "playing nice" with the Windows updates). Re-application of heatsink thermals and removal of Win10 from all my 2CoreDuo-vintage machines in favour of 64-bit Puppy Linux versions has proved the ideal solution. Long May the 2503 Serve ]