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With the Do-It-Yourself market in mind, Asus designed the internal components of the C90S to be easy to access. All it took to remove the bottom panel of the C90S was the removal of four screws.

Both the CPU and video card were quite easy to remove. Both only requried the removal of 3 or 4 screws in order to take off the metal cooling plates. The CPU is set into a standard desktop variety Socket 775, while the video card is of the MXM, Moblie PCI Express Module variety, which is also easy to remove: once the cooler is off, the video card slides out almost like a large module of RAM.

Speaking of the RAM, our unit has 2 GBs of PC5300 Nanya. The Asus C90S has 2 SO-DIMM sockets, that support up to a maximum of 3 gigabytes of Dual Channel DDR2 800MHz SDRAM. A 4 GB ceiling for RAM would have been nice -- but 3 GB should probably be enough for many people interested in the C90S.

The optical drive was also quite easy to remove. All it took was the unscrewing of one screw, and that pretty much did it. The hard drive, however, was not as problem-free. Our 2.5" 200 GB SATA Toshiba HD was nestled firmly into a metal housing frame, that would take a bit of work to remove, due to the not very accessible placement of screws.  This is actually a step backwards from other laptops, some of which have completely screwless removale of the HD's.

Overall, I'd say that Asus suceeded in making the C90S upgrade friendly as far as CPU and video card go. Personally, I have never had my hands on a laptop that was so easy to dig into.