If you have ANY cracks FOR SURE do the tape. I would also make sure to wear safety glasses as it can fly all over even with the tape. And do it somewhere that you don't mind tiny glass shards going everywhere. I had one 3 inch crack in the glass in the lower right corner and it started spidering. The plastic pics don't work once well once they hit a broken point in the glass so you better have a lot of heat to loosen the adhesive, or you end up using an exacto knife to get around the cracked spots.

I would echo the other comments about how precise this is. And unlike many similar internal laptop connectors, the retaining flap flips up from the opposite side of the ZIP connector. I was initially picking at it from the ribbon cable side and it wasn't coming up. The pics don't make this crystal clear. Start from the battery/opposite side of the ribbon cable and pick at it. Also, getting the ZIP connector back in was perilous! I scratched it using the pokey tweezers that came with the kit, but luckily everything worked.

Exactly. I purposely severed mine as it was a complete screen replacement and made the LCD removal easier.