January 26, 2025 · 2 minutes read

I upgraded my developer laptop

I previously wrote about my developer laptop. One of the issues I mentioned in that post was the broken built-in speaker. The other issue was the insufficient RAM even after upgrading to 12GB of RAM.

I was thinking of replacing the current laptop with the new one. But after some consideration, I decided to just upgrade my current laptop instead of buying the new one. One of the considerations was the limited budget.

If I were to upgrade the laptop, It would be safe if I had around $600 up to $700 of budget. Meanwhile, so far I don’t have any performance problems with the current laptop. So doing the upgrade would be a big win.

So, last week I ordered the 16GB of RAM and the built-in speaker. The packages both arrived on Friday and Saturday.

Usually, I would go to the local computer store: ask them to do the job and pay them $7. But, after watching YouTube videos about how to upgrade the RAM and replace the speaker, I thought that it was not that difficult and that I could do that myself.

So, based on the YouTube videos I’ve watched, and a little bit of courage. I did the job. This is the first time I’m doing the laptop upgrade and service myself, anyway.

And I did it safe and sound! Haha. Before closing the bottom casing, I checked the speaker and the RAM. The speaker now working properly, and the RAM is installed properly. Now, my laptop’s memory is 20GB, and the usable memory is 17.5GB. That’s the enough amount of RAM to me.

The next replacement would be the laptop frame. But it’s not that urgent. It still can be postponed. That’s why I decided to upgrade the RAM and fix the built-in speaker first.

Let’s see how good the performance is after the RAM upgrade.