BIOS update for ENVY 4 - 1010sn ultrabook - model year 2012

[PaulG1186]

Hi guys.

I have this ENVY 4 - 1010sn ultrabook from 2012. I revived it a couple of days ago and managed to put Win 10 64-bit Home edition on it. The notebook has two memory slots and each had an 4GB DIMM for a total of 8 GB. I bought 2x8GB DIMMS of the same characteristics and the BIOS sees the 16GB. But when booting the laptop is dead slow. It looks like something from a long long time ago where there was so much memory available, that the CPU was not able to cache it all hence the slowness. As the processor (i3-2367M) does support up to 16GB I thought maybe a BIOS update would fix this somehow. So - are there any chances that somewhere on the HP legacy BIOS folders there may be a BIOS update for my machine? Otherwise I'll return the 16GB sticks and stay (sadly) with the 8GB.

Thanks!

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

The Crucial memory report indicates that your notebook can support 2 x 8 GB of memory.

HP - Compaq ENVY Ultrabook 4-1010sn | Memory RAM & SSD Upgrades | Crucial.com

Since it has the same chipset as the model referenced in this discussion, I wonder if doing the same thing for your notebook will work like it did for the Probook 4540s:

Read the info in the green shaded solution text.

Solved: Performance degrades in Probook 4540s after memory upgrade - HP Support Community - 2268503

The BIOS updates were only written to be run on W7/W8 so I don't know what would happen if you updated the BIOS using W10.

Since HP retired support for your notebook in 2022, you can install the latest BIOS update from this reputable 3rd party website.

This is the model sold in the UK with an Intel processor and chipset.

HP ENVY 4-1010sa BIOS (driverscollection.com)

I think that even if you updated the BIOS, it would not make a difference.

Try the safe way (Windows command) to get the memory to work before trying to update the BIOS using an unsupported operating system.

[PaulG1186]

It worked! I actually did not have high hopes for this, but hey! You learn a new thing everyday! 

Thank you so much!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Thanks for letting us know that the trick works on other notebooks with similar hardware to the Probook 4540s.