am I able to upgrade my laptop memory?

[hebroots]

 After good discussion here, I took my laptop to the HP recommended repair shop near me, UbreakIFix, for the RAM upgrade from 8GB to 16 GB (max).  I had decided with the computer still under warranty that I would leave the job to others.  I have done upgrades myself before but that was with laptops that had outside access portals.  On this Pavilion I cannot even get to the battery without completely opening the case, with lots of different size screws, and a few pages in the manual about the dangers of static electricity.  I was going to order the RAM chips myself but if there was a problem it would be a hassle to get the shop in the middle of that.  The shop was able to order the same ones at the same price (Crucial).  Once the parts arrived they installed them in about one hour.  I am overall very pleased.  The price was reasonable, I thought, about $65 each for parts and labor.

I was glad to have walked this through the repair process ahead of time, and it all worked out.

My purpose in all this is to be able to play online chess as best I can.  This definitely increased my playing strength.  The goal is to have the computer search through as many move combinations in about 45 seconds to find the best moves.  Graphics is not so important with this.

Turns out that 4 cores and 16GB Ram is still well shy of what better equipped players can muster, but at my level I am happy.

Just want to thank folks for their support here.

[Huffer]

Thanks for the update. Happy to have helped.