The Asus Eee PC is a very capable machine, but some users might find the standard 512MB of RAM to be somewhat limiting in terms of the number of and the actual applications they can run or even the operating systems they can install. Fortunately, the Eee uses standard laptop memory and is easily upgraded.
At first, memory upgrades couldn’t be carried out by the user without voiding the Eee’s warranty, but Asus came to their senses and recently declared they would continue to honour any warranty even if an Eee had been fitted with extra RAM.
I don’t know about a picture painting a thousand words, but I found this video showing the Eee PC memory upgrade process to be very useful and I see little point in writing a detailed post explaining how to do it, but I will add that I also removed the Eee’s battery before starting the memory upgrade and that you can confirm you’ve installed the memory correctly by the following:
1. Boot your Eee PC
A non-booting machine is a sure sign of incompatible memory. If you get to the login screen then great!
2. Check the System Info
In the Settings tab of the main system menus, opening up the System Info utility shows you how much RAM is available to the operating system (OS). Here’s a screen shot from my Eee PC after upgrading the internal RAM to 2GB.
You may have noticed that the Memory Size is reported as 1GB. That’s because the Xandros OS supports a maximum of 1GB of memory so even thought I’ve installed a 2GB memory module, the OS can only make use of 1GB.
3. Run Diagnostics
From the Settings tab again, starting up the Diagnostics utility and looking at the System Info shows you how much RAM you actually have installed. On my Eee, you can see that there really is 2GB of RAM installed.
That’s all there is to checking your memory upgrade has been carried out successfully and you now should have an Eee PC that’s capable of having lots of applications open simultaneously and even installing a resource hungry OS such as Windows XP.
Footnotes
The memory I used for the upgrade was purchased from 7dayshop and was the 2GB SODIMM DDR2 667Mhz (PC2-5300) memory module.
I will post my opinion of the Asus Eee PC at some point, but as I just upgraded my Eee earlier this morning the process was still fresh in my mind and I thought it might be useful to someone.
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