How to change/upgrade the RAM of a Laptop

Lately, I wanted to buy a Linux laptop, because of various reasons. Although I had a Raspberry Pi 3 which is running Raspbian OS (Debian based) but its ARM-based, hence I wanted a dedicated laptop. For buying a new laptop my criteria were:

• Should have at least Intel i3 processor
• Should be cheap
• Should be running DOS by default (didn’t want to pay for Windows which I’ll ultimately remove only)
• should have a decent screen
• should be compact

All of my criteria were met by this Lenovo v130 laptop. It is the cheapest laptop from Lenovo having i3 7th processor, was compact with 14-inch screen, screen quality was good and was anti-glare as well and it came with DOS as well. Perfect!
But one downside, it had only 4 GB RAM which was becoming a bottleneck, but was well anticipated as well! Hence my first goal after buying this laptop was to increase the RAM.

So, here starts the story:

Buying RAM

Since the maximum RAM it supports is 12 GB hence I could buy another 8 GB RAM only. Things to consider while buying RAM:

i) The type of RAM should match. If the default RAM is DDR4 then you can add only DDR4 type RAM only.

ii) The frequency should match. If the existent RAM has 2400 MHz frequency then try to buy RAM of same frequency only. If the frequencies mismatch, then the RAM would function in lower frequency.

iii) DIMM type is for PC RAM and SO DIMM is for laptop RAM.

Hence for me, I ended up buying this RAM.

Adding RAM to the laptop

1. You can check the current configuration of hardware of your laptop by using the lshw UNIX tool. It is already installed on Ubuntu.
2. Run sudo lshw and see all the configuration. But if you specifically want to check the memory configuration use sudo lshw -c memory

You can see that current the size of RAM is 4 GB.

3. Now you need to open the laptop. Unscrew the laptop screws at the bottom and open the base. Be gentle but firm, you need to apply pressure as well.

4. Once it’s opened it will look like this:

5. Now you need to attach the RAM. Normally you can see the RAM slots, it is quite evident on the motherboard. But sometimes the RAM slots are protected and enclosed, then it becomes a problem to locate the RAM slot. This was the case with this laptop as well, hence had to take help from the Almighty Google to figure it out. In this motherboard, the RAM is located at the bottom right in the above picture, inside the aluminium rectangular box.

6. Now open this aluminium box and insert the new RAM there. It should look like this:

7. Now close this RAM enclosure and then the entire base. Screw it tight. Now you’re done. To test if RAM was added successfully use lshw again:
Do sudo lshw -c memory and you should see something like this:

So you see that the entire RAM size is now 12 Gb. Voila!

This process is pretty generic and should be applicable to most of the laptops.
Happy hacking!