The MXM-Upgrade Acer 8942G experience

By Kris Verbeeck

Most people purchase a notebook because their old one broke down, or slowed down, or because they need a bigger one, or a smaller one, or... I bought one because I needed a MXM 3.0 slot. Actually, I needed it pretty fast. So with Acer long line of MXM notebooks, the various 8942 models with different graphics solutions and a few online sources confirming the 3.0 B slot, we went right ahead and purchased. We went for the cheapest version as the only thing we needed was the MXM slot.

In fact, we were pleasantly surprised. Well built, large screen, not too heavy, numeric keypad, multimedia controls, plenty of IO... Purely practical purchase or not: I was quite happy. Actually, the best part is the keyboard. I truly loved typing on it. Not to mention the backlight on it. As much as I was falling in love with this nice machine, it took me roughly two hours to grab a screwdriver and pop the hood..

 


Bottomside: clear enough. Large panel and a battery. Simple screws. Nice surprise: no sticker to prevent tampering.

Hood popped. Harddrive, mini-PCI express graphics card (with a free slot for a TV tuner I guess), 2 populated memory slots and the CPU + cooling.

Nice: the secundary HD slot is available without additional cable. No bracket to fix it, but that can be solved without too much hassle.

The MXM card itself can not be accessed like this. The heatpipes disappear under the fixed part of the housing. So time to loosen the rest of the screws to take of the back shell. That includes taking out the DVD drive.

One off the screws holding down the shell is hidden by the drive

The shell still doesn't budge. The HD bracket holds it down. So that's the next thing to go.

With the HD gone, more screws are revealed.

Still no dice. These standoffs are secured also with screws, obviously from the other side....

... under the keyboard. The keyboard has little tabs at the top thap can be loosened by pushing a small, pointed knife on it.

More screws. All off them need to go and the flatcable need to be taken out. To do that, you need to click the brown hood on the connector up.

Still. No. Go. Time to get rid of the top panel. Sigh. Loosen the flatcables.

This cable, probably the LVDS cable for the panel, has a tab that you can use to pull it loose. Easy enough, just rock it a bit.

Still no go, but the shell is loose enough to allow a peek inside. No sign of a MXM card but... these things in the red circles look an awfull lot like memory chips!

So, that's it. No MXM inside. It will probably come as no surprise that this didn't exactly make my day. So what happened?

So, in the end it goes to show you can never make assumptions with respect to MXM. And it shows that even we can be wrong and that the disclaimers we put on our site are there for a reason!