Why was my laptop designed to prevent the memory from being upgraded?

[JWAKE]

Hello,

I've standardized my family's laptops on HP platforms over the years because of their dependability and ability to be upgraded.  My daughter is now in college and I purchased her a sweet little touchscreen [14-ek0033dx] model that came with 8GB RAM.  She's now using the full suite of Adobe products for school and running out of RAM.  Researching the Maint. & Service Guide for this model and then popping the cover, I believe I found an industry standard single socket DIMM protected under a metal cover!  It looks like the only way to upgrade is replace the system board with a 16GB version or hack-away at the metal cover and hope that I don't damage it.

Anyone else experience this???

Thank you!

[banhien]

@JWAKE 

That's true, it ONLY has 8GB on-board RAM. On-board means RAM is integrated (or soldered) to its system board. HP and other vendors have many machines which ONLY has single slot on RAM and/or on-board.

In this case, you have to buy new system board which contains

• New CPU + video,
• New RAM,
• New Windows license

Because they are on one piece of hardware called system board. That is very close to the cost of new machine. I would buy a new machine and read its specs carefully (My experience: I bought an expensive business HP machine and it does not have SD card reader. I store many documents on an SD card, now I have to use external card reader, I will definitely carefully read machine specs next time).

Regards.