Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

I’ve just bought an HP/Compaq NC4000 laptop for Sally.

It’s turned out to be the sort of quality machine that I thought it might be. It’s compact, pretty light at 1.6Kg, with a 1.5GHz Intel Pentium-M processor. The 30GB hard disk and 12.1″ TFT colour display are OK, but the memory it arrived with, 256Mb of RAM was lacking. All-in-all, not too bad for around £500 from Morgan Computers.

Windows XP just doesn’t function once you get a couple of applications running and sadly an eighth of the memory, 32Mb, is held aside for use by the graphics card.

The long and the short of it - it needed a memory upgrade.

Crucial has always done memory well for me, so I bought a single 512Mb, believing it would be easy to upgrade via the panel on the bottom of the machine.

It arrived quickly, sadly at 7:30 on a Saturday morning at home, and fitting it was quick. I fired up the machine, post-upgrade and it reported around 96Mb, not quite the 768Mb I was expecting.

I’ll save you the details of all of the tests, phone calls to support lines and palaver of buying the right tools for the job. I’ll cut to the chase of how to fix it.

If there’s one thing to know about fitting extra memory, its always fit your largest memory module in the lowest number memory slot. Translated to English, the 265Mb of RAM the machine arrived with needed to be in the slot in the back of the machine, and the 512Mb where the 256Mb came from.

Sadly the 265Mb is fitted under the keyboard, which was not as easily accessed as the expansion slot.

Getting the keyboard off involves removing three torq screws from the bottom of the machine. Not having a torq screwdriver, I went along to my favorite hardware shop, Buck and Ryan and bought a size 9 bit (£1.50).

The three screws to remove are deeply sunk with two at the back and one around the middle of the laptop. Once these come out, pop off the silver strip at the top of the machine, by the screen hinge. Lifting the keyboard you can see the memory module near the touch pad.

You’ve done the hard bit now.

Before you start touching memory, make sure you earth yourself first to minimise the chances of static electricity damaging it. A simple way to do this is by touching a radiator.

Pop out the 265Mb memory by spreading the silver holders in its middle. This will lift the module, enabling to easily remove it. Make sure you place it on the anti-static (probably silver) bag the memory upgrade arrived in.

Place the 512Mb module in the slot, ensuring it clicks down. Now reverse the process you’ve just done - seat the keyboard, replace the silver strip, flip the machine and refit the torq screws.

Final part is fitting the 256Mb module. This is very easy, by undoing the philips screw, opening the flap, and repeating the same insertion process as before.

Re-secure the flap and power the machine up. The BIOS will identify the extra memory correctly, press F1 to save the setting.

You know what, you’ve got a upgraded machine running 768Mb of RAM.