Thinkpads Forum

I've followed the threads that touch upon this ... but they are 2 years or older.

Am trying to get a bit more performance from my W500 via upgrading from 8GB to 16.

What is the current status of this possibility?

Back in an A31P with 1GB max per IBM's spec sheet ... when they released a 1GB stick I was the first on this board to buy and try a pair and it worked.

Looking for a similar development with the W500.

I doubt this will work. There have been attempts to upgrade the W700 series from 8G to 16G and it fails because of either the bios or architecture or both. I don't remember the details. Search a bit and you'll probably find something on the W500.

As I recall, the W510/W710 series were the first to support 16G, even tho 8G sticks weren't commonly available then.

I don't think this will work. The W700 is similar in specs which leads me to believe that it uses the same GM45 chipset as the W500. I have also looked at this thread on Lenovo's forums showing that the W700 won't take 16GB: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-Th ... d-p/179878 I too was hoping to put 16GB in the W500 I'm purchasing soon but it looks like this one's busted.

Many thanks for the input ... guess that my next "W" upgrade will probably take 16GB. My current w500 load is 8GB RAM + Turbo, with 314GB SSD.

It may sound crazy but one of my memory hogs is my browser ... with 60+ open tabs as I search/postpone reading; and when I also load Inventor and/or PS ... everything comes to a crawl (W7 Pro). More memory (or better work habits) should help ... I think.

Reflecting on my first notebook circa 1985, it was a ROM/RAM DOS2.1 box with 512KB memory, a 16-bit processor, and 2MB SRAM drive. A 3-finger salute rebooted in about a second .. and the couple of apps (Lotus 1.0 and Word 1.1 WYSYWIG, and a DB) I had ran a lot faster than today's bloated equivalents. And my ROM/RAM W500 is "deja vu all over again".

FrankK-F wrote:Many thanks for the input ... guess that my next "W" upgrade will probably take 16GB. My current w500 load is 8GB RAM + Turbo, with 314GB SSD.

It may sound crazy but one of my memory hogs is my browser ... with 60+ open tabs as I search/postpone reading; and when I also load Inventor and/or PS ... everything comes to a crawl (W7 Pro). More memory (or better work habits) should help ... I think.

Reflecting on my first notebook circa 1985, it was a ROM/RAM DOS2.1 box with 512KB memory, a 16-bit processor, and 2MB SRAM drive. A 3-finger salute rebooted in about a second .. and the couple of apps (Lotus 1.0 and Word 1.1 WYSYWIG, and a DB) I had ran a lot faster than today's bloated equivalents. And my ROM/RAM W500 is "deja vu all over again".

I definitely do the same in Firefox all the time. Since I've started working in Chrome more often for web apps, I've had to cut down on the open tabs as each tab is a process. The memory you have in the machine is just fine. Just cut down the number of tabs you have open to 1/6th of what you have open right now and if you need to read the content later, bookmark it in some way.