"i'll be real man. you're getting way ahead of yourself." - maybe not a putdown, but it's discouraging for no good reason.
You learn how to do things by researching and asking others. OP saw a cool old laptop they wanted to get running, did some research on it, found out what they'll need to fix, then came here to ask others with experience for advice. There's no black magic in a Portable that only technology wizards can fix. It's a little trickier than something like a Mac LC but it's the same general process. The biggest risk where inexperience might cause damage is if they messed up the soldering. As long as they practice before working on the Portable (which they had already indicated before your comment), then the repair itself will likely go fine.
The only real risk they're taking is that the LCD will be shot or that something else on the motherboard other than caps has died, but that's a risk you take with any laptop.
Anyways, point being, there's really no reason to try to discourage the guy from giving it a shot, especially given the fact that they're doing the research. My first ever SMD recapping project was a PowerBook 145's LCD, which is frankly more fragile than a portable logic board. I made it even more difficult on myself because I accidentally bought extremely tiny ceramic capacitors without realizing how small they'd be. I still pulled it off. It's not that difficult.
