It works! 8Gb RAM in my Acer TravelMate 6593

I thought I’d post this because so many like me might benefit from my experiment. We have a number of Acer TravelMate 6593 laptops here at Black Marble. They’re great machines – plenty of grunt, a lovely screen and most of the toys you could need in a laptop that’s used for a mix of IT admin, dev and technical sales (including demos). The only downside is that they only ship with up to 4Gb of memory, and Acer say it won’t take more.

I’ve wondered about that for while – all the documentation I could find said that the system supported 4Gb SODIMMs in the two memory slots and the Intel chipset inside supports more than 4Gb of memory.

The cost of two 4Gb SODIMMs for experimentation always stopped me. However, the now lower price, combined with an absolute requirement to run the SharePoint 2010 IW virtual machines (which need 8Gb to fire up!) made me take the plunge.

The good news is that two DDR3 4Gb SODIMMs from Crucial arrived, were installed and worked first time. The system booted with no errors, Windows 7 (x64) recognised 8Gb of memory and a quick bit of partition shuffling later I had a dual-boot Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 + Hyper-V laptop. Marvellous.

Obviously, your TravelMate might not be as accommodating as mine, so make sure you check the returns policy on your RAM!