Last year I bought this laptop from Dell, it was pretty zippy so at the time I didn't think it was very neccessary to put 2 gigs of memory in it.  Well over the course of the year I starting to increase the demand a little more so I figured it was about time to upgrade. I assumed the upgrade wasn't going to be very hard since my last Dell laptop was very easy to upgrade. I recieved the new memory modules and started to get to work.

I first made sure my laptop was complety off, I have a habit of leaving it in suspend mode for long durations of time. Then I removed the battery and let it sit a while making sure that there was no power source.

Right in the middle is the one plate with two screws. Just remove the two screws lift up the plate and unclick the modules that are seated in there and quick replace.



It is just that simple right? WRONG! I removed the plate to discover only one 512K meg memory module inserted. This confused me for a few seconds, so I had to revert back to the old trusty user manual. The user manual mentions there is two memory slots, A and B one on the bottom (shown above) and one under the keyboard.

The B slot was pretty straight forward but slot A is going to need a little more work. Just my luck the memory slot would be in a location that is a pain in the ass to get to, right underneath the keyboard. Seriously who designs this stuff and why do they still have a job? The user manual made it sound like it was a cake walk to remove the hindge plate and keyboard. I started by removing the two screws inside the battery bay.

Then flipped the laptop over and clicked the plate off. A small note was on this step saying to to not use extreme force or you will break it. So you have to deal with about million snap fits holding this little tiny piece of plastic on, this little piece pissed me off.

After working the hindge plate off which took about 10 minutes of twisting and pulling (gently). I finally got the hindge plate off.  Next slide the keyboard out.

And there it is slot A is revealed the manual wasn't lying to me! Now all I have to do is swap the memory modules and replace everything.

And I managed to do it with no visable damage to the hindge plate. Now to boot the computer and check to see if the new memory is being detected and working correctly. 

The computer booted up and the memory check cleared, and the 2 gigs of RAM is detected by windows no problem.