My new memory came in from NewEgg.com, and as I thought, the installation was a breeze! Here I have the computer on a flat surface, and I’m grounded and have made all efforts to reduce static electricity. I’ve unplugged the computer, removed the battery, and opened up the memory slot. Here we see the one old memory stick, with room for another one:
Here is one of the new sticks. The maximum that the Thinkpad T30 can handle is 1GB, meaning 512MB on both sides. And they needed to be 200-pin DDR SODIMM sticks. Here is what I found:
I went with PC3200/DDR 400 because memory is backwards compatible. So even if I get something a little too powerful for my laptop, it can’t hurt it! Removing the old memory is incredibly easy. You just pull the plastic outer pieces outward, and the entire stick pops out, as shown below:
Then pull out the old memory – and take note of the orientation of the stick, and the little slot towards the left. You will want to put the new memory in the same way!
New stick #1 is going in!
To get it in, I basically pulled those two same outer pieces outward while pushing the piece in, and then it snapped right into place. I gave it a little extra push even when it clicked in to ensure that everything was in place.
And stick #2 is in place as well!
When you restart the computer, you can press F2 or F12 to enter setup, and see what your computer is registering for your memory. So when I started this up again, it was registering 1024MB of memory, meaning that both of my sticks were being read. Hooray! It was also apparent how much faster/better the computer was running overall.
Suggested Citation:
Sochat, Vanessa. "Memory!." @vsoch (blog), 23 Jul 2010, https://vsoch.github.io/2010/memory/ (accessed 16 Apr 24).