Questions about Upgrading an Aspire E 15 E5 575 72L3

SteveD1

Hi and thanks for any help in advance. My wifes Aspire  Laptop is getting slower by the day and I would like to upgrade the memory & hard drive. I know I can put a 2.5' SSD in place of the Standard HD. After inspecting the HD/Memory compartment I noticed that it has a NVME port with 3 different screw sizes. 

1) Anyone know if this port is usable and able is bootable? And if so what size NVME?  I would like to use a 512GB NVME as the bootable drive.

2) Also the laptop has 8GB of Memory (2x4GB) I know from reading the specs it can max out at 32GB, I would at this time like to take it to 16GB. My memory question is does it have to be even paired
(EX. 2 x 8GB matched pairs)? or can it be just be 1x 16GB stick?

I know this is a lot of info to ask, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here is the spec's of the laptop.

Acer Aspire E-15 (E5 575 72L3) 
Intel Core i7 - 6500U 2.5 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz
Intel HD Graphics 520 up to 4160 MB Dynamic Video Memory
8 GB of DDR$ Memory (2 slots of 2x4GB) 
1 TB HDD / 5400 rpm.

If any other info is needed, please ask here. I will be monitoring this feed on a daily basis

Again thanks in advance.

Thread was edited to add model name to the title

billsey

OK, you should be able to boost things a fair amount before running into limits. Your processor is already as good as it's worth getting, you can bump the memory to 16GB, though the 8GB you have now might still be enough. The big bump is going to be the SSD. Your Aspire E5-575 has an M.2 slot for a dedicated SSD, but only supports SATA drives in the slot. Pick up most any M.2 SATA SSD (Not NVMe or PCIe!), though name brands will be less likely to have glitches. If you can afford it go for a bigger one, since you are going to be cloning the HDD and it's a 1TB.

OK, with the new drive handy you ready to install. Shut the system down, disconnect anything that might be attached including the power supply and flip it over. There are three screws holding the drive cover in place, remove all three and the cover should come off easily. Here's a picture of that area:

C is the HDD, D & E are the memory and F is the SSD. Your F will be missing. There should be a screw there, but if not what fits is an M2x3mm. Lots of the ones you find online have a nice wide head on them, the ones at the local computer shop or hardware store might have a smaller head, but should work anyway. Plug the drive into the slot (toward the top of the picture), there are a couple of notches that make it impossible to get it backward. Screw it down, you don't need to tighten it a lot, just enough so it won't vibrate loose. Put the drive cover back on, flip it right-side up again and reconnect you power and such.

Next step is the cloning process... There are lots of free apps for it, I used Easeus Todo Backup Free for the last one I did and it worked fine. You are going to clone everything from the HDD to the SSD and have the software adjust partition sizes only on the C: drive. You likely have four partitions on your current drive, with three of them really small and hidden and the other C:. Once the cloning is done use Disk Management to verify you have the same four partitions on the SSD as you have on the HDD. If that's good then it's time to reboot.

Reboot to the BIOS and verify that the F12 boot menu is enabled, then save and exit and use the F12 to choose your boot drive. You should have two options, the old HDD and the new SSD. Boot from the SSD. It should be a *bunch* faster getting to your desktop... When you are up and have double checked to make sure your files all seem to be there and intact, fire up Disk Management again and edit the HDD (be sure it's the HDD and not the SSD) to remove all the partitions on it. When it's cleared create a new data partition that is full sized and you are done. From now on everything runs off the SSD and the HDD is only used for data you put out there.

Let us know how it works out and if you need any help with some of it...