Whoever thought of putting ram under...

the keyboard on the Dell Inspirons should be fired. Was it that hard for them to have 2 slots on the bottom? I just installed 2 gigs of ram on my E1405 and taking off the keyboard to get to the second slot was a big pain in the butt. And after all that work then putting it back together to find out the right side of my keyboard wasn't working because the cable wasn't connected correctly. The average customer couldn't do this.


Howard

 

really?!?!? what on earth are they thinking?!?!? so you have to open the keyboard to only change the RAM? jeez

 

My dad's machine has the memory under the keyboard, I didnt think it was that big of a deal when i did he memory upgrade. I did think it was a weird spot, and hard to find, but not hard to do or access.

 

Its just this whole procedure, gotta remove the battery, then unscrew the lid hatch, then you gotta pop off this very fragile plastic part that covers the On button and the power leds, then you need to slide off the keyboard and unplug this little plastic connector. Then unscrew another two screws to swap the ram, then you gotta put everything back together and hope it works.

 

Really? I only put one gig of RAM in the Inspiron that is shipping to me soon, thinking it would be easy to update the RAM. Now I have to take it apart? I don't know how ready I am for that. This is my first laptop.

 

Yeah it seems the smaller machine you get the harder it will be to upgrade. especiallly if you have big hands.

 

Odd. The E1705 that I have has access to the ram at the bottom. I don't need to tear mine apart.

Ahhh... ok. I just looked at the E1405 service manual. There is access to one slot on the bottom and the other is under the keyboard. However since it is a smaller laptop the board is also going to be smaller so it is possible they didn't have any room to stick both on the bottom of the board.

 

the e1505 i have, it looks like its on the underside of the notebook in a unscrewable panel

 

The E1505/6400 has a bottom panel that can be removed to upgrade ram specifically, but the E1405/640m has a different architecture inside as it is smaller so they probably had to find a spot other than the bottom to put the ram into.

I am sure if they were able to put it on the bottom they would have, I mean it's probably easier for them too if someone ever wants to upgrade ram and they are asked to do it.

 

Maybe Jonathan Ive has been moonlighting at Dell. All the PowerPC iBooks had the RAM slots under the keyboard as well.

 

space/heat output constrainsts, the smaller you make the chasis, the more problematic component placement becomes

 

The physical connection for the memory is normally joined together for cost savings. On a larger device like the Inspiron 6400, there is room to have the slots side by side. On smaller devices, there isn't the same physical width and so the memory is stacked on top of the other which keeps them physically close but takes up half the physical width. This means you need to access one from the bottom and the other from the top - usually by removing the keyboard. It all depends on the device architecture though - my Acer laptop is actually slightly bigger than my Inspiron 6400 but because of the very large copper heatsinks for the Pentium 4 3.0Ghz. the memory is stacked as well which means one slot is accessed via removal of the keyboard.