Thanks so very much. I feel so stupid.  I took a closer look at my vx550 and realized its got a 4+4 connector!  I have some experience with hardware and am unsually not afraid of upgrading. However, there seems to be some confusion as to whether Dell's mobos are proprietary and are not upgradable. I believe this is old information, however, because the 546 comes with an AMD board so I don't think its proprietary. Now I feel a lot better about it.  Thanks for the information. I am so happy I can use this power supply! Except for the fact that its not modular, it is a great PSU.  I hope our conversation here helps others because other than the power supply, these are nice machines.  Maybe someday dell will just start selling them with 500 w!

Thanks again.

W Hubble 

You can use most generic standard ATX power supply units, with either a 24-pin or 20+4-pin main motherboard power connector, with or without the on/off switch.

You should be able to buy a compatible power supply from either a local or online computer store.

Note: You require a power supply with four SATA power connectors.

Check out the Corsair 550w power supply HERE

Note: Most of the newer Power Supplies have a EPS/ATX12V 8-pin [4+4] connector, that has a detachable 4-pin section, allowing it to be used for the 4-pin P-2 12v ATX connector. 

Bev.

W Hubble 

Happy to have helped.

Actually both Dell's motherboards and cases do have proprietary features, but on most models, the power supply is not one of them. 

Bev.

I have a inspiron 5150 laptop!! plus I already changed the power adapter 3 times!! it's the system board problem.But now I need

to know how to start a trouble shoot to figure out what went wrong in the process of re assembly of the system board +the all the

rest of the components.I pretty confident I put everything back together in the correct way according to the instruction manual.

thanks for the help anyway.

smartsam  

The better section to post this in, would be the Laptop forum HERE, this is for Desktop Hardware.

Bev.