This is a short post about a Dell Inspiron 3050 I upgraded a little bit ago. This is a tiny pc, similar to an Intel NUC. Its a Intel Celeron, and came with a 32GB SSD. I got it for around $150, with an Office 365 subscription; thus it was worth it to me. It came with 2GB of ram, and a 32GB SSD, these days those are not expensive to swap; I wanted to swap the components for 8GB of ram and a 512GB SSD. Below is a short guide with some photos of opening this thing up.

First we needed to remove the case, this involves flipping it over, and taking the 4 screws out that are in the little feet.

That gives you access to the RAM DIMM. Easy to swap if you want to do just that. Now there are 4 screws at the outer corners, those come out then the board can fold out keeping the antenna and other cables connected. Flipping that over and putting on the table shows the CMOS battery, as well as the SSD.

After replacing the SSD its just a matter of flipping the board back onto the posts, and screwing it all back together. Fairly easy to do, but I couldn’t find a ton of photos online so I thought I would put some up. I ended up installed Hyper-V 2019 on it, the box is fairly slow with its Celeron dual core J1800 processor; but can run a Linux VM or two. Plus its a cute little computer that uses very little power.

One last note about putting it back together, there are little metal spokes that stick out from the top metal mount, those need to line up with the motherboard the system wont go back together correctly.