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Upgrading Inspiron 11-3168
So I won this laptop on Ebay for about 250, refurbished and all stock stuff. Downside was that it only has 32BG of Hard Drive space and 2 gigs of ram. I looked up what it needs and everywhere I looked, even Dell's own product page, said I can upgrade the ram to 4GB. Ordered the specific ram it needed, opened it up....... soldered ram....? No slots anywhere to add or replace anything. Even the HDD wasn't a thing, it was a tiny chip soldered into the motherboard. What blew my mind the most was that there is a hard drive caddy slot for a laptop drive with absolutely no way of plugging one in. I learned the hard drive space can only be upgraded via another motherboard, but I am still able to upgrade the ram using what I bought. My question is, how? I see now slots to plug it in, and I have taken this thing apart down to the screen looking for them. Is Dell leading me on? Because I've had three tech support members all tell me I can still upgrade.
ejn63
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November 29th, 2016 04:00
There are two versions of these systems - the "tablet" style you have (with a soldered-in eMMC drive and soldered-on RAM) and a "notebook" style that has a single RAM socket and a connector for a conventional 2.5" drive.
Unfortunately, they both carry the same model number but use different mainboards. The only way to upgrade the "tablet" style is to replace the mainboard with one from the "notebook" style.
The price difference between the tablet and notebook style systems is about $100, and you can expect a board to cost more than that -- before you add the cost of the RAM and hard drive, so it's going to wind up costing more to upgrade what you have than it would to return the system to the seller for a refund, and buy the model you want separately.
MoonlightSeraph
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November 29th, 2016 07:00
Is there any way to find this board? I've searched around but so far can only find the tablet type. Does the motherboard itself have a model number I can search?
ejn63
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November 29th, 2016 15:00
These are new enough models that the boards may be in short supply outside of buying from Dell - you can try calling Spare Parts and seeing if they have the the board you're looking for.
I suspect the vast majority of these are stocked by retailers who can then advertise a "new notebook" for $250 or less - as a loss leader to get people into the store. They're essentially dedicated word processor/internet browsing appliances.