Replacing RAM in Inspiron 2600/2650

My Girlfriend's computer died.

It was sad.

We cried.

Then I started troubleshooting. It would sort of boot up....ahhh, I can't remember. I need to write these darn blog posts right after the incident.

Anyhow, I thought maybe bad RAM. I used the <God Voice>Ultimate Boot CD</God Voice> to do a memtest and yeah, bad RAM.

("BAD RAM! Get back under the trailer!" )

Luckily I just happened to have a spare module hanging around. I got my jewelers screwdrivers and started taking plastic bits off the bottom of the laptop. And Lo! There was only one RAM stick accessible by this route. WTF? And, it wasn't the RAM that I needed to replace. ARGH! Where the heck did they put the other RAM, and what kind of muttonhead engineer would put it in a place where you can't easily get to it?

I unscrewed all the rest of the screws on the bottom of the laptop, and then, when the bottom didn't come off easily, I paused.

1. This was not going to be easy to take apart. Laptops can be a real pain to get apart, and back together again. Like, 4 layers and little plastic snap tabs, and tiny hidden screws pain.
2. Upgradeable parts are usually easy to get to.

Even though it is against the Man Code to read directions, I have learned through painful experience that it is usually faster to follow directions than to try to strike off into the wilderness of little plastic snap tabs.

So, I found this site: How to disassemble a Dell Inspiron 2650. This guy is SOO awesome for going to the trouble to post all the pics of the Inspiron 2650 disassembly procedure. I just wanna click all over his Google ads. But he doesn't have any

Turns out that the RAM module was pretty easy to get to. I just had to lift out the keyboard which was actually fewer screws than those that hold the bottom plate on.

The new RAM is playing nicely with the old RAM and the old computer is humming along nicely on its mission of email and web browsing.