Upgradability

I have a branded laptop from a renowned company.

It has 1 GB of RAM.

Now I need to upgrade, and want 2 GB of RAM.

I should be able to buy one more stick of 1 GB and have 2 GB of RAM, right?

Wrong.

The 1 GB of RAM in my laptop is not in one stick of 1 gigabyte. It is in two sticks of half a gigabyte each. If I now buy a 1 GB stick, I’ll have to take out one half-gig stick and replace it with the new 1-gig stick. Which leaves me with 1.5 gigs.

I could buy two sticks of 1 gig each and replace both the half-gig sticks. But then I have bought the entire RAM anew, and I have two half-gig sticks which are of no use to me. I cannot sell those easily, because if I need 2 gigs on my machine today, there would hardly be anyone in the market who would want a stick with capacity below 1 gig. With passing time, these half-gig sticks would become more obsolete and less in demand.

And this is not just my story. All laptops come with just two slots for RAM, and both sticks are occupied with contemporary capacity sticks. Which means that upgradability goes out of the window when laptops are designed/made.

I remember when I had a replacement VC820 motherboard shipped from Intel, because the CC820 I had bought was defective, they gave me one stick of 128MB RAM and an empty CRIMM (because the memory technology being used, RDRAM, did not work with empty slots). In short, if I wanted to double my memory I had to buy another 128MB stick and replace the CRIMM with the new stick.

How difficult is it to leave one slot empty, or ship laptops with three memory slots, so that users do not have to face such situations when they want to upgrade? Or is it a tactic to force users to either spend more by either wasting money on memory that’d be useless to them, or buy a new laptop?