Monday, May 19, 2014

Upgraded Lenovo Ideapad Z570 to 16GB Ram

According to Lenovo the Z570 only supports up to 8GB, but after doing a little research I found multiple instances of folks upgrading to 16GB, so I took a leap of faith and tried it with mine. Success! (How-to video on YouTube helped with installation)

I had a bit of a hard time finding a US supplier for the ram sticks. Crucial's helper application stuck with the Lenovo documentation and would only recommend up to 8GB, but this is the EXACT kit that I used:

Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3 1333 MT/s (PC3-10600) CL9 SODIMM 204-Pin 1.35V/1.5V Notebook Memory Modules CT2CP102464BF1339

[UPDATE 12/28/2017]
Someone pointed out in the comments that this particular model is no longer available (not surprising given the age of this post).  Amazon recommends another kit, CT2KIT102464BF160B, which has the same specs as the memory currently recommended by Crucial for the z570.  I can't say from personal experience how well this memory would perform in practice, but it seems like a safe substitute:

Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3/DDR3L 1600 MT/S (PC3-12800) Unbuffered SODIMM 204-Pin Memory - CT2KIT102464BF160B
[END UPDATE]

This Lenovo forum had several users also state that they could use 16GB, and was a key factor in my decision to make the leap.

Here is a screenshot of System Monitor (I'm running Fedora on this machine).  I have 6GB allocated to a Win7 VirtualBox VM, which is why the usage is so high.


Google GovDevChallenge Hackathon

Participated in my first ever Hackathon this weekend (5/17/2014), what an experience that was! The idea behind this Hackathon was to give hackers a chance to make government more efficient and transparent. Colorado and Wyoming worked with Google and Galvanize down in Denver to put the event on, and I went down with four other developers from ETS to compete. We didn't win but we learned a lot and booked some serious overtime haha.