Just looked at mine, it appears you have to at least take off the 10 screws holding the back plate on. Haven’t looked inside to know how many more are hiding in wait, hope this helped.
Here’s a fairly good review on this series of notebooks. These notebooks don’t have a dedicated video GPU that this review spends a lot of time talking about.
Note: he is wrong about it not being user serviceable - you can fairly easily take the 10 screws off the bottom and carefully pry the bottom cover off.
As far as I can tell, it does not have a backlit keyboard. However, it does come with an integrated 24GB SSD card that acts like a cache in front of the HDD. This helps a little with faster boots and loading some programs, however, it does not take the place of a dedicated solid state drive, nor will it perform as well.
On second look I’m not sure this model does have the integrated 24GB SSD drive. That might be only on the model that has the integrated Video graphics.
Does anyone know if you can add an internal DVD or BlueRay drive to this model? I know that some models come with an optical drive. It would be nice to have for playing movies.
Based on this slim factor, there is no room, nor a slot for an optical drive (see video above). Just get an external USB 3.0 blu-ray, it’s more awkward- but I’m finding that I rarely use my optical drives anymore. I primarily stream movies or watch movie files. I just keep one in the laptop bag. Here is one for $70 (after promo code) and free shipping http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827129079
Thanks for that link. I have an external USB DVD drive. I think you are right that this model does not have the extra bay to put in an optical drive or a second HDD. I will find out once I receive it.
Any idea how the i7 model would do with working up data? I want to use this primarily for science presentations and data workup (not simulations) that uses large Excel and SigmaPlot files. Would this more than take care of the processing power I need?
Help is appreciated