Best Buy Removed Half The RAM From A Gaming Laptop Because It Said The Laptop Only Supports 32GB
A customer sent a Lenovo Legion 5 in for warranty service with 64GB of RAM.
The Best Buy repair report confirmed the laptop had two 32GB RAM sticks, but the technician said the laptop “only accepts 32GB RAM maximum.”
The removed RAM was sent back to the customer with the laptop.
Original Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1vpew29/best_buy_sold_me_a_64_gb_ram_laptop_and_it_worked/
_**Laptop specs(it supports 64 GB): https://psref.lenovo.com/product/legion_5_16irx9?tab=spec**_
European so zero experience with Best Buy, but I feel we need to talk about how RAM incompatibility is no longer just a historic thing that used to happen back in the nineties and early 2000s, but one that quietly creeped back post 2020.
I manage business laptop fleets for a living. In the time of COVID-induced supply chain breakdowns, it was hard for our clients to get their hands on Custom-To-Order business laptops they’d usually get fully configured directly from the manufacturer (back then we were almost exclusively on Lenovo Thinkpads). Lead times for CTO laptops went from 2-4 weeks to 8-9 months.
Some clients couldn’t wait that long and had us shop for off-the-shelf retail units we could upgrade to company standards ourselves. In 2022 we got a bunch of Thinkpad T14 Gen3 units with 16GB of soldered-on DDR4-3200 and one free SO-DIMM slot for a RAM upgrade. Quick and easy job - we got a bunch of Crucial 16GB DDR4-3200 cookies and went to work upgrading all the machines to 32GB. Machines upgraded fine, ran memory tests fine, and deployed a Windows image fine.
A few days later, on a Monday, we were supposed to start deploying them to users. One of the things each tech would do just before final handover was to run Lenovo System Update on each unit one more time for good measure. (This was a new model and they get quite a few BIOS updates in the first year after release as teething issues get ironed out.) And it turned out that this Monday Lenovo just made available a new BIOS version for the T14G3. Mind you, Thinkpad updates were rock-solid for decades at that point. And then they weren’t.
When a machine failed to boot after a BIOS update the first thought was how lucky it was to catch a failing laptop even before it goes out to the user. “Once is an accident.”
When a second machine failed to boot after the same BIOS update, I started getting nervous. “Twice is a coincidence.”
When a third machine failed to boot, we pulled the plug on the deployment. “Three times is enemy action.”
The machines were dead. Blank screen and fans running 100% indefinitely after power-up. Had Lenovo Premier Support dispatch engineers to site. They brought replacement motherboards. They replaced the motherboards (moved over our RAM and SSDs to the new ones) and booted successfully. Ran BIOS update. Did not boot. With three new “dead motherboards” they escalated the ticket.
It took three months and two more BIOS revisions for Lenovo to tell us that “our third party RAM is the culprit”. By then we had already figured it out ourselves. Removing the Crucial sticks and letting the MB go through the automatic “memory reconditioning” process would actually bring these T14G3 laptops back to life with the latest BIOS and just their onboard RAM. Funnily enough, we had these same SODIMM sticks happily running in HP Elitebooks and Dell Latitudes without an issue. But there was some weird interaction between Lenovo’s soldered-on RAM and Crucial’s sticks.
Where Lenovo lost us as a customer was their official response when asked about the incompatibility and which modules would work: “The ones with a Lenovo sticker.”
They had no idea what the issue was. They’d tested different SODIMMs and the models that happened to work they’d relabel as “Lenovo memory” and resell with 200% markup. They refused to publish a compatibility list or support anything without their sticker.
In the meantime we got a bunch of HP Elitebook 840 G8 laptops to cover for the unusable Thinkpad stock. These came with two SO-DIMM slots and no soldered memory, and we managed to get them with 2x16GB Samsung DDR4-3200 sticks. Each stick had an HP label, too. They also worked without a hitch when we swapped these out for the Crucials.
In the end we put the Samsung sticks into the Thinkpads and - funnily enough - they still work today with HP-labeled RAM. So do the Crucial sticks in HP laptops. Our own research concluded that it was single-rank / dual-rank difference between paired up modules that was causing issues (something you can’t fully swap out if half of your RAM is soldered). We did get random freezes while testing HPs where we tried to pair a single-ranked Samsung module with a dual-ranked Crucial module. Lenovo refused to confirm that this was the real issue all along.
We even had an internal Spongebob comic about this:
After decades with Thinkpads, we went with Elitebooks. I remember it being heartbreaking for me at the time. But what was worse was the industry-wide return of the ghosts of the past: weird glitches, mysterious incompatibilities, and horrible degradation of once stellar enterprise quality control. And all of it has gone even more downhill since.
I’ll fully admit that the scenario you experienced is probable, given what’s in the article.
But the main issue is that Best Buy sell a configuration of this laptop with 64GB of RAM and this fix openly contradicts that such a configuration is possible.
On top of that they “repaired this laptop” by removing part of the product the consumer paid for. If I had a repairman come look at my washing machine and they removed the extra rinse feature because that was causing it to flood but that feature was a stock feature, I would be pissed and litigious.
The fact that they didn’t actually inform the customer is also bogus.
My understanding is that it was a marketplace seller, not Best Buy themselves, who sold the laptop to the customer.
At least the techs actually made an effort to diagnose the issue and figured out that removing the stick of RAM fixed it. They’re not responsible for the sale of a laptop with more memory than the motherboard can handle.
All these marketplaces are a disaster. So many shady sellers posting the same items on every site they can, and nobody takes responsibility when an issue inevitably pops up.
Yes. But it is likely that the seller made such upgrades based on the spec sheet provided by the company on question (either Best Buy or the manufacturer) and in either case someone is liable for that spec sheet being wrong and it promoting the purchase of said laptop.
I’m not sure if this is still a thing or not, but about a decade ago there was this whole “dual channel memory access” mode that accelerated memory access for the CPU by accessing data from 2 DIMMs in parallel.
In motherboards capable of doing this, memory slots would come in multiples of 2, with specific slots being paired and if both slots of such a pair had memory DIMMs of the same size, the motherboard would use “dual channel” mode, otherwise it would use the slower “single channel” mode (it could also be forced by configuration to always use “single channel” mode)
Dual channel only really worked well if the timings on both DIMMs were pretty much the same, so people wanting to take advantage of this mode would buy memory sticks as pairs, not just having the same size and brand but even from the same manufacturing batch so that both had data access timings as close as possible.
If you occupied one of those “paired” slots with mismatched memory of the same size as the other slot of the pair and did not explicitly disable “dual channel” access on the BIOS, you could get memory problems because accessing both DIMMs in parallel had problems when they returned the memory contents at different rates or with different delays.
All this to say that maybe what the Lenovo started trying to do with the BIOS update was dual channel mode or similar, only it was pairing a soldered memory module with a memory module in a SODIMM slot and those have different memory access speeds because physical contacts and directly soldered pins have quite different electrical characteristics for high speed signals, so the former simply can’t safelly handle as high frequencies (and hence data rates) as the latter.
Quality control was there because competition and customer agency were there.
Now your typical customer is an ape. They are less brain than what Apple stuff was intended for in the 00s. By far.
Quality and competition are reliant upon customers with agency. While customers are now the kind of people who are secretly thinking they are almost there in inventing a warp engine, because Claude told them so.
Thanks for the story! Interesting read.
Yep, don’t mix RAM. Soldered (cheap to manufacture) and still a slot (upgradeable) is only on paper good.
Jeebus! Here I am shopping for new laptop since my P53 is aging out. I don’t do much engineering work anymore so I was looking at T16 units or maybe a P16s.
I am terrified of looking at the Elitebooks since the one I had 15 years ago was complete shite.
Daamn thx for the story time, hope that laptops start shipping with CAMM2 support instead of soldered ram.