Inside Dell Inspiron 5545 – disassembly, internal photos and upgrade guide
Just before the full review, we would like to shed some light onto the internals of the Inspiron 5545. It’s a budget type of notebook that doesn’t offer as much upgrade options, but it’s worth mentioning how to perform those upgrades safely.
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1. Accessing the most common upgrade options
This one is pretty easy. At the bottom of the notebook, you will find only two screws holding the service cover. After opening it, you can proceed with removing the battery. It’s made by Dell and it’s rated at 43 Wh – a bit larger than most in this class. On the left, you will find the 2.5-inch Samsung 1TB HDD and you can always swap it for a larger HDD or SSD. M.2 SATA SSD slot is nowhere to be found, though.
Also, there’s only one RAM chip, so you have to swap the 8GB one for a 16GB if needed. Keep in mind that the motherboard supports up to 16GB of DDR3L-1600 RAM. Right next to it is the Wi-Fi module.
2. Complete disassemble
The only reason you would want to to that is cleaning the fan. This can be done by completely disassembling the machine with the help of a plastic tool. The bottom cover has to be removed as well as the keyboard with a thin plastic tool (a credit card will do too). Beneath the keyboard, you will find several screws holding the bottom piece, proceed with removing them and then you have complete access to the rest of the motherboard.
You can take a loot at the price and available configurations here: http://amzn.to/1QCsjh6
Thanks for this article it’s actually helped me, but do you know a site that I can purchase a single 16gb ram for the laptop, most of these online sites have only 2 8gb Rams
16gb of ram on this Dell 5545 laptop? Are you sure? Everywhere I look it says the max is 8GB of RAM. Can you verify that a 16GB RAM stick will indeed work? Thanks.
hi did you ended up upgrading it to 16gb? i also have the same quesiton as you thanks