Comments on: Dell Inspiron Mini’s Guts Reveal Upgrade Opportunities

By: colten

colten — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:50:27 +0000

The WWAN slot will not take mini PCIe SSD HDD. If you put your SSD HDD into that slot, it won’t boot.

By: jan

jan — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:13:52 +0000

Maybe, if you buy the Kingston 4GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134685

Not cheap though ($315)

By: admin

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:04:09 +0000

Only to 2GB

By: Karen

Karen — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:28:09 +0000

Can the Dell Mini Inspiron only be upgraded to 2 gb RAM or can I go to a 4 gb?

By: Daniel K

Daniel K — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:01:23 +0000

Nick,

I just got one of the new ones and took a look inside. It seems I have the newer type of motherboard with the WWAN card slot removed. All they took off was the minipci header, and I bet if you could find some somewhere, you could easily solder it back on and see if the bus is still active. Thats what I plan to do at least.

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:10:47 +0000

They obviously removed the WWAN when they worked out they could make money by supplying it only as an option with a contract with a Phone provider. I for one am really annoyed as I now have wasted space and do not have the ability to install a WWAN card now or in the future.

By: Sue

Sue — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:22:22 +0000

Guess what, Dell apparently changed motherboards, you no longer get the open pcie slot. Dell may very well get mine back I haven’t decided yet. even if you changed plans there’s no reason to emasculate the motherboard that was just nasty and could even be called the old bait and switch.

By: Brad

Brad — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 05:44:32 +0000

Will upgrading ram void warranty?

By: indy

indy — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:50:41 +0000

Do yourself a favor and re-format and reinstall XP (if you purchased that version), it runs sooo much better without all the bloat that comes pre-installed. Keep in mind also that the XP version comes with the hard drive compressed, causing slow performance. You can reinstall windows using a flash drive, as shown here: http://tdcomp.blogspot.com/2008/03/install-xp-from-usb-flash-drive.html , its well worth it.

By: logiotek

logiotek — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:56:41 +0000

Whoever is looking for speedy Mini PCI-e SSD:

http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/CategoryProductList.jsp?cat=Browse+By+Product+Type:Solid+State+Disk+Drives:PCI+Express+PCI-e+SSD

4/8 GB SSDs in Mini Inspirons will be slower than above link (38 MB/s read, 10 MB/s write) but 16 GB ones will be on par or faster (80 MB/s read, 25 MB/s write). Write speed is more of a bottleneck than read speed on the SSDs. I hope this helps. Those MyDigitalSSDs might be better on writing speed than 16 GB STEC SSDs in Mini Inspiron, I’m not really sure. Got to test them out.