Time for some oldie levity.

Introduction Selecting the RAM Opening up Replacing the RAM Reassembly References Introduction I do virtually all of my hobby and home computing on Linux and MacOS. The MacOS stuff on a laptop and almost all Linux work a desktop PC. The desktop PC has Windows on it installed as well, but it’s too much of a hassle to reboot so it never gets used in practice. Recently, I’ve been working on a project that requires a lot of Spice simulations. NGspice works fine under Linux, but it doesn’t come standard with a GUI and, more important, the simulation often refuse to converge once your design becomes a little bit bigger. Tired of fighting against the tool, I switched to LTspice from Analog Devices. It’s free to use and while it support Windows and MacOS in theory, the Mac version is many years behind the Windows one and nearly unusuable. After dual-booting into Windows too many times, a Best Buy deal appeared on my BlueSky timeline for an HP laptop for just $330. The specs were pretty decent too: AMD Ryzen 5 7000 17.3” 1080p screen 512GB SSD 8 GB RAM Full size keyboard Windows 11 Someone at the HP marketing departement spent long hours to come up with a suitable name and settled on “HP Laptop 17”. I generally don’t pay attention to what’s available on the PC laptop market, but it’s hard to really go wrong for this price so I took the plunge. Worst case, I’d return it. We’re now 8 weeks later and the laptop is still firmly in my possession. In fact, I’ve used it way more than I thought I would. I haven’t noticed any performance issues, the screen is pretty good, the SSD larger than what I need for the limited use case, and, surprisingly, the trackpad is the better than any Windows laptop that I’ve ever used, though that’s not a high bar. It doesn’t come close to MacBook quality, but palm rejection is solid and it’s seriously good at moving the mouse around in CAD applications. The two worst parts are the plasticy keyboard and the 8GB of RAM. I can honestly not quantify whether or not it has a practical impact, but I decided to upgrade it anyway. In this blog post, I go through the steps of doing this upgrade. Important: there’s a good chance that you will damage your laptop when trying this upgade and almost certainly void your warranty. Do this at your own risk! Selecting the RAM The laptop wasn’t designed to be upgradable and thus you can’t find any official resources about it. And with such a generic name, there’s guaranteed to be multiple hardware versions of the same product. To have reasonable confidence that you’re buying the correct RAM, check out the full product name first. You can find it on the bottom: Mine is an HP Laptop 17-cp3005dx. There’s some conflicting information about being able to upgrade the thing. The BestBuy Q&A page says: The HP 17.3” Laptop Model 17-cp3005dx RAM and Storage are soldered to the motherboard, and are not upgradeable on this model. This is flat out wrong for my device. After a bit of Googling around, I learned that it has a single 8GB DDR4 SODIMM 260-pin RAM stick but that the motherboard has 2 RAM slots and that it can support up to 2x32GB. I bought a kit with Crucial 2x16GB 3200MHz SODIMMs from Amazon. As I write this, the price is $44. Opening up Removing the screws This is the easy part. There are 10 screws at the bottom, 6 of which are hidden underneath the 2 rubber anti-slip strips. It’s easy to peel these stips loose. It’s als easy to put them back without losing the stickiness. Removing the bottom cover The bottom cover is held back by those annoying plastic tabs. If you have a plastic spudger or prying tool, now is the time to use them. I didn’t so I used a small screwdriver instead. Chances are high that you’ll leave some tiny scuffmarks on the plastic casing. I found it easiest to open the top lid a bit, place the laptop on its side, and start on the left and right side of the keyboard. After that, it’s a matter of working your way down the long sides at the front and back of the laptop. There are power and USB connectors that are right against the side of the bottom panel so be careful not to poke with the spudger or screwdriver inside the case. It’s a bit of a jarring process, going back and forth and making steady improvement. In addition to all the clips around the board of the bottom panel, there are also a few in the center that latch on to the side of the battery. But after enough wiggling and creaking sounds, the panel should come loose. Replacing the RAM As expected, there are 2 SODIMM slots, one of which is populated with a 3200MHz 8GDB RAM stick. At the bottom right of the image below, you can also see the SSD slot. If you don’t enjoy the process of opening up the laptop and want to upgrade to a larger drive as well, now would be the time for that. New RAM in place! It’s always a good idea to test the surgery before reassembly: Success! Reassembly Reassembly of the laptop is much easier than taking it apart. Everything simply clicks together. The only minor surprise was that both anti-slip strips became a little bit longer… References Memory Upgrade for HP 17-cp3005dx Laptop Upgrading Newer HP 17.3” Laptop With New RAM And M.2 NVMe SSD Different model with Intel CPU but the case is the same.

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Forget GB Railways and GB Energy... how about GB Drones?

Today marks day 13 of using the iPhone 16e as my primary phone, and after this review goes live, I'll be moving my eSIM back to the 16 Pro that I use day to day. I intended to use this phone for a month before going back to