SOLVED Lenovo laptop

[Iceboy]

Lenovo idea pad 330..Went into our local computer and repairs and asked about putting more memory in it, as it only has 4gb.
He told it's impossible to increase the memory on these machines as it's fixed to the board. Is he right?.

 

[Grizzly]

Yes , he is right. The 4GB are soldered on the mainboard.
This is a post on the Lenovo forum:

Re:ram upgrade ideapad 330S-15IKB type 81F5​

Yes, you can upgrade, but there's only 1 available slot, as you saw in the pic I posted. That is, you cannot remove the existing 4GB of RAM which is soldered to the motherboard. You can buy an additional 4GB or an 8 GB RAM to take the total memory to 8GB or 12 GB respectively.

English Community-Lenovo Community

forums.lenovo.com

it may apply to you.

 

[Iceboy]

Thanks Grizzly, have to admit I thought he just didn't want to do it, well he probably didn't. Maybe I ought to go closer to the city to have done.

 

[Tim Locke]

My Lenovo Ideapad is the same. I added an 8GB some years back. 12Gb improved the machine noticeably.

 

[Iceboy]

Did you do it yourself Tim?.

 

[Tim Locke]

Did you do it yourself Tim?.

I did it the classic way for a laptop.
Spent 1/2 how on youtube a) to find the correct way to open up the laptop b) 10 minutes to open it up...carefully!

2 minutes to plug in the new SODIMM module
20 minutes to test everything and close up the case


Some months later I had the case off gain to replace the HDD with an SSD

 

[Iceboy]

Nice one Tim. I need to do something, has even Defender brings it to a stand still now.

 

[Tim Locke]

Your Lenovo still has a HDD not an SSD right?

THis last year I have a friend** bring me 4 old laptops (the oldest being 2014!) which she had given up on because the were too slow. They all had 8GB or over RAM and had their original 500GB HDDs. 4 different brands of HDD.

I replaced each one with the same sized SSD, I used Samsung because I have never had trouble with any Samsung product. More expensive one was $93 Cdn. The prices changed between between Amazon and BestBuy on a weekly basis.

Each machine immediately was back running at full speed or maybe a bit faster.



So for you if you don't feel you can do it yourself then find a reliable mom-n-pop place to do it for you.


** This friend is a landscape architect and does take her laptops on projects and they do get bumped around a bit and so once they got a bit sluggish she would go and buy a new one. Now she has 5 perfectly working laptops.

 

[Grizzly]

I have a laptop that dates back to 2007 and came originally with Windows XP. I am currently running Windows 10 on it but made a few changes: Maximizing RAM and changing to a SSD. What an improvement in speed. With the old HDD the laptop took about 3-4 minutes just to boot, now with the SSD it takes about 45 seconds. I was pleasantly surprised by that, so I put SSD in all of my computers, all of them are Western Digital/Sandisk and I also have 2 PNY's, no significant difference so far. Never looked back...

 

[Iceboy]

So it could end up with an hard drive change and memory?.
This is the system:
AMD A4-9125 RADEON R3, 4 COMPUTE CORES 2C+2G 2.30 GHz
4.00 GB (3.39 GB usable)
64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
But I can't see what hard drive is there, it does say something like WDC500 WD500 24VLT-HATO?.

 

[Grizzly]

So it could end up with an hard drive change and memory?.
This is the system:
AMD A4-9125 RADEON R3, 4 COMPUTE CORES 2C+2G 2.30 GHz
4.00 GB (3.39 GB usable)
64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
But I can't see what hard drive is there, it does say something like WDC500 WD500 24VLT-HATO?.

Looks like that you have an ICH-7 chipset from Intel inside. My laptop has the same (awful) memory management (out of 4GB only 3.37 usable). Memory wise there is nothing you can do, but you can change your 500GB WD drive to a 500GB WD SSD like this one:

ssd drive | B&H Photo Video

Shop B&H's in stock, large inventory for fast shipping, great service and everyday low prices on ssd drive. For more info, please call 800-947-4415

www.bhphotovideo.com

I have two of those and they run every day without any issues. Of course, the brand is of your choosing. I used to have a 160GB HDD in my laptop, which now houses a 1 TB Sandisk (which is the same as WD). My other laptop has a 1TB PNY in it and runs perfectly. No matter what brand you choose, IMHO you can't steer wrong but only improve the speed of the laptop. I have to assume that your drive is a HDD with a SATA connection and not a PCIe or NVme drive.

 

[Tim Locke]

I am sure that that Lenovo would have two chip slots for SODIMM memory and only one is filled with the 4k module.


I am totally knowledge free about AMD processors but this is a Lenovo.


Iceboy , you need to take the back cover off. Youtube will show exactly how to do it.

 

[Iceboy]

That's a job after Christmas Tim, I'm full up with a virus and no medicines at the moment that's whipping through the country.