14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week Acer pushed its two new fanless Aspire E11 and V11 laptops into retail in the US. The two devices are budget-friendly products starting at just $250 / €184 and taking advantage of the Intel Bay Trail chip architecture.
Anyway, as it turns out, Liliputing discovered one of the two new laptops, the Acer Aspire V11 is upgradable in terms of memory and storage. The cheaper E11 is also upgradable, as we will see in what follows.
According to him, it is not difficult to get access to the notebook’s battery, storage and wireless card. The back of the device is secured with 13 screws, but they are easily removable, as is the cover per-se.
However, in order to get your hands on the RAM, you’ll need to pop some more screws. You’ll also need to remove the LCD, battery, keyboard, touchpad and speaker cables. Last but not least, you’ll have to get the motherboard out in order to reach for the RAM on the other side.
The guys over at MyFixGuide have already posted a guide in which they show you step-by-step instructions on how to disassemble the Acer Aspire E3-111, removing the battery, hard drive, WALN, RAM memory, heatsink and motherboard.
Right off the bat, you can notice that the easiest thing to upgrade is the hard drive or wireless card. The Aspire V11 will arrive with a 500GB HDD drive out of the box, but if you’re craving for more, there’s a way to do it.
Taking out a single screw will allow you to replace the wireless card. You’ll need to take out more screws and lift the edge of the motherboard a little bit in order to allow the slim hard drive to come out.
Then you can proceed to replace it with another HDD or faster solid state drive. This is a nice touch, especially for those bummed out by the presence of the HDD instead of the solid state drive.
Acer offers just 4GB of RAM with the Aspire V11, but if you wouldn’t mind having extra, you should know the Intel Celeron or Pentium Bay Trail chips inside offer support for up to 8GB of RAM. However, you should note, there’s only a single slot for memory.
As for the battery, it doesn’t look like most batteries out there, but if know where to look, you might find a replacement. The current battery in the V11 is a 46Whr or 48Whr one, while the cheaper E11 has a 30Whr. The positive aspect is that at least you can swap the lower battery in the E11 with a V11 one.
