How to Disassemble a Dell Mini 12

Walk-through on how to disassemble a Dell Inspiron Mini 12

First get 1 small + screw driver

and 1 pair of latex gloves(to prevent ESD)



1-Take your Mini 12 and flip it upside-down

2- Un-Screw all the screws on the bottom. NOTE: There is no need to map out where each screw belongs because they are all the same.


3- Remove the bezel above the keyboard


4-Unscrew the 2 screws above the keyboard holding it down and remove the keyboard


5- Detach the wiresfrom the motherboard, leading from the top of half of the base(power, sound, touchpad, and antenna's)


6- Remove the top half of the base


Now that you have opened up the laptop, you can look at all the components and clean it with canned air(if necessary).

 

Ahem...
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins1210/en/sm/index.htm
>_>

 

I have heard that dell had these manuals but in The Official Dell Inspiron Mini 12 Thread
someone was asking if a 2.5" hdd could be modded into it...and I told them I was going to be opening up mine to look inside, so I thought I would make a disassembly thread with pictures

 

Wow... i spy upgrade potential

 

WOW I never even thought of that...It makes sense though

 

Please note watchers- GPU is the big chip and the CPU is under the thermal sticker to the right of the big chip!

he changed the picture...

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Looks rather like the mini10.

 

What is the material the hard disk caddy made from? I am just curious which plastic looking material is sufficiently heat conducting in order to be used for a caddy. It is first time I see a non-metal caddy.

Nice and instructive pictures. Thanks! I don´t have this netbook, nor I am intended to have any, but it is interesting to have a look inside it (maybe it will be needed to be prepared to help others with upgrading advices).

 

The hard disk is rubber or silicon like and it fits down into its 1.8" plastic fitting in the plastic base. Is this what you wanted to know?

 

Thanks, now I know what to look for on ebay as a proper replacement caddy for 1.8" disks, if the original one is not available.

 

Hey

So what do you think, can it be easily modded to fit a 2.5" hard drive?

 

It looks like it physically wont fit.

 

no The laptop is to thin, the motheroboard uses a proprietary cable to connect the hard drive, and 2.5" is to wide

 

Ohh... that sucks. Oh well, waiting for the NC20 now...

 

One thing I forgot to mention about the processor, graphics card, and memory being on one card is that the mini 12 is configurable with a 1.6ghz atom and a 1.33ghz atom
Since atom processors are soldered and not removable, dell had to do it

 

It'd be interesting to see a comparison review between the two... and throw in an NC10, Mini9 and 12" 'proper' laptop.

TaVM erwallie - Good stuff.

 

Lenovo had a deal on a Thinkpad X61 some time back, for $650. $150 more is quite a lot, but it had a couple of things going for it, like the Trackpoint, CPU and better expandability.

 

on the big mini website they've reported that overseas ppl have inserted the mtron 3018 ssd into the mini 12 and tests show it's about twice as fast as the dell 4200rpm pata hard drive. it looks tempting until i realized that doing this mod would make a mini 12 fast become about $500. the mtron ssd is available on fleabay.

 

I try to update BIOS through windows, but it hangs and I shut down the windows, and cannot open anymore.. .pity me... any way that I can reset the BIOS or recover my mini 12?

tqvm

 

You shut down Windows in the middle of a BIOS update? You may well have just rendered your system unbootable.

 

NO NO NO, you should not have 4-second-shutdown during a bios flash...

Your gonna need to call dell and get them to get you a new bios chip...