Laptop RAM upgrades

[EssExTee]

There's no feeling worse than when you complete some seemingly routine computer maintenance but then it won't boot afterwards -_-

[ToniCipriani]

The module wasn't seated properly? Snapped both tabs down and locked?

Reverse the upgrade and see if it boots again, laptops generally are picky about modules. Sometimes using a faster module than specced can cause problems.

[EssExTee]

@tonicipriani I eventually got it, reseated the module (even though it was fully inserted the first time!) and it booted.

[ToniCipriani]

If the slot was empty it could just be dirt.

[EssExTee]

@tonicipriani What, you think I'm some basic bitch that buys base model laptops??? I'll have you know I was replacing a 4gig stick with an 8gig.

[ToniCipriani]

Amateur. I just upgraded mine a few days ago from 8 to 16. Got the stick for $52 before price shot right back up and now Amazon wants $75 for an open box one.

[Danny Korecki]

I just bought 16gb DDR4 for my new micro build.

[VincentMalamute]

I feel an urge to jump in here about my 256GB RAM module. Or something...

[RallyDarkstrike]

@EssExTee I always take a can of canned air to my RAM slots if I am upgrading or changing RAM....I find even a tiny speck of dust make them surly with booting afterward unless I give them a spritz of air.

My upgrade of the day was replacing a daughterboard in my laptop that had a non-working USB port to get that port working again and doing an HDD to SSD upgrade while I was at it. Boot time with Linux Mint went from like...2 mins to 20 seconds. Cannot complain!

[BicycleBuck]

@essextee I need to upgrade my convertible tablet/laptop. It’s rockin’ 8gigs and needs 8 more. I swapped in an SSD when I did the battery swap a few months ago and it’s like a new machine.

On the destructive side, I disassembled an old docking station for grins and salvaged a DVD-RW drive out of it. It’s one of the slim laptop style drives. I have the occasional need for one, so I bought a USB3 to SATA portable case for it. Works like a charm!

[EssExTee]

@tonicipriani It's DDR3, so biggest stick you can get is 8. The machine has 4 soldered and a slot, so now I have 12.

[EssExTee]

@vincentmalamute ReadyBoost doesn't count.

[VincentMalamute]

In 2016, my hospital upgraded the radiologist reading room workstations. There was a pallet of 20 or so multi-core, multi-CPU workstations. Graphics cars were low rent Quadros though. A second pallet of monitors that had cost $10,000 each. But gray-scale only.

I walked by the pallets everyday for weeks before they finally got thrown out. I should've asked Oppo if anyone wanted anything from that pile. I could've snuck out an item or two. Maybe they really were useless.

[EssExTee]

@bicyclebuck I swapped to SSD five years ago and never looked back. Easily the best investment, and what with the weight savings, speed, and robustness it's ridiculous that you can even buy a new laptop with a mechanical drive nowadays.

[facw]

@essextee I thought it was ridiculous when my company issued me a laptop with a spinning disk five years ago (it also had a 16GB SSD for caching, but their image didn't have the required software installed, and even with it, I never saw the software report more than a few hundred megabytes of that cache used). To not have an SSD today is basically IT malpractice today. My IT department has gotten a bit better, I don't know what they are using in their lackluster standard machine, but they issued me a Macbook Pro with a 1TB SSD (definitely more SSD than I need). They also upgraded my Windows laptop to a 256GB SSD. Personally, I made the switch to SSDs in 2010 with a 120GB Western Digital drive for my laptop, and haven't looked back (though I kept the spinners in my desktop until the end of 2013 because I couldn't afford the capacities I wanted there, so I just used a 64GB as an RST cache drive).

[ToniCipriani]

@essextee said in Laptop RAM upgrades:

@tonicipriani It's DDR3, so biggest stick you can get is 8. The machine has 4 soldered and a slot, so now I have 12.

It does exist, lol

https://www.amazon.ca/Crucial-Single-PC3L-12800-Unbuffered-204-Pin/dp/B0123BRIDK

Support of course is up in the air. Usually the spec only lists the biggest stick available at launch, the higher density may or may not be supported by the chipset.

[EssExTee]

@facw Unfortunately manufacturers are still skimping on SSD capacity. You can get a 1TB drive (SATa or M.2) for around $100 now but unless you're buying a $1k+ workstation notebook you're likely getting stuck with 128 or 256GB. Hell, some of the cheaper stuff only comes with 16 or 32GB soldered storage and that's barely enough for a phone, let alone a laptop.