Acer Aspire 5 (A514-55) review – good budget daily driver

Disassembly, upgrade options, and maintenance

If you want to remove to remove the bottom plate, you have to unscrew 10 Phillips-head screws. After that, you can pry the panel with a plastic tool. One of the upper two corners looks like the best starting point.

The battery is a 54.6Wh variant. Before taking it out you have to remove the connector from the motherboard. The next procedure is to undo the two Phillips-head screws that are fixing the unit to the base. The capacity is enough for 8 hours and 20 minutes of Web browsing or 6 hours and 40 minutes of video playback. The result is decent.

The battery is held in place with a few screws because there is a dedicated socket for it on the inside of the bottom plate.

For memory expansion, you get 4 or 8GB of soldered DDR4 RAM. Luckily, there is a SODIMM that can handle up to 16GB of DDR4-3200MHz memory. So, the maximum possible amount of RAM is 24GB in dual-channel mode.  For storage, there is one M.2 slot compatible with Gen 4 NVMes and a SATA slot for regular SSDs and HDDs.

The cooling solution is nothing but basic. It has one fan, one heat pipe, a single heat sink, and a heat spreader.

Author: Nikolay Palaozov

Author: eng. Kroum NikolovHead of Engineering at LaptopMedia.com, inventor and innovator with 40+ years of experience in electronics and high technology.

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