Michael Haren’s Wassupy Blog

Installing/Upgrading Memory in a Dell Latitude 6520 (aka MOAR GBs!)

in nablopomo 2011 and technology

I just got a new machine! It’s amazing. Our awesome IT guy got an 8gb memory upgrade, too. It came in while he was on vacation so what was I supposed to do? Let it taunt me like a fool? No, I can do this.

Upgrading the memory in my sweet new laptop turned out to be easy, but I had to just guess how to do it because I couldn’t find any documentation on how exactly I was supposed to do it. Fortunately, it was very easy. Not MacBook easy, but easy enough.

Short and sweet:

  1. Disconnect power, remove battery
  2. Remove all the “D”-labeled Phillips-head screws from the bottom
  3. Pop off the bottom plastic
  4. Install the memory
  5. Put it all back together

In pictures:

the back of a laptop with the battery removed

Take out the screws (be mindful of the HD screws because they’re different than the others)

the bottom of a laptop with the bottom case removed, exposing the internals

an in-use memory slot and an empty memory slot

an in-use memory slot and an empty memory slot

memory slots

memory slots

memory slots

memory slots

memory slots

memory slots

Windows System Info page showing 8gb of memory available

For $60, 8gb seems like a no-brainer upgrade if your laptop supports it. And now, I can finally reap the rewards of choosing to go with Windows 7 x64 two years ago. Yay!