upgrading and modification

[ps3nes]

so i'm a little bit confused here.
i have lots of experience building, upgrading, and interchanging parts in PC's. Been doing it for years.
Bought my first laptop the other day, Asus N53SV.

Come to find out that Asus recommends not upgrading?
This thing came with 6gb of ram. a 4gb and a 2gb.
First off, in order to run dual channel, the ram sticks have to match in size, correct?
second, it's upgradable to 16gb

yet asus will give me no information about the specs that i should be aware of for the ram purchase?
I want a SSD in here as well.

I was trying to ask asus if my video card in this notebook is exchangeable and i can't get an answer.

I purchased 4 4gb 1333 ddr3 ram sticks. 204 pin. Patriot memory
system freezes up and reboots. becomes highly unstable.
remove the ram, replace the original. works fine again.

wtf.

does anybody have any experience upgrading or did i buy into a ****ty line of a machine and i should bail out and actually buy something else?

[Hayden]

i have this system and have installed 16gb ram and SSD with no trouble or stability issues

[Silver Wolf]

Make sure you match up the RAM types. Using a different type of RAM can cause those issues. The details can all be found on the RAM sticks themselves and just match up the numbers with the RAM you are buying. The SSD shouldn't be an issue but the Graphics Card may be an issue Graphics Cards in laptops are hard to replace at the best of times and impossible at worst.

[Zygomorphic]

ASUS does not recommend upgrading on a lot of their machines , but you can do it anyway. ASUS recommends that you do not, probably because n00bs will break their machines, and then blame ASUS. Those like you with experience can safely ignore it--the RAM and the SSD upgrade, that is. Like @Silver Wolf said, "Graphics Cards in laptops are hard to replace at the best of times and impossible at worst." If you had wanted a better graphics card, the G-series would have been what you should have looked at.

4x4 GB can be unstable with not-so-good memory, but Patriot is supposedly a good manufacturer? Did you get 2x(2x4) GB sets? That would be the way to do it. Honestly, depending on the difficulty of adding 2x4 GB later, I would recommend just using 8 GB (unless you use more than that), and rolling the rest into a very nice SSD. The performance jump from a real man's SSD is far greater than that from 8 GB more RAM--unless you use 10-12 GB of RAM during your daily routine.

[I LIKE MY O.C COLD]

did you go to crucial.com to check to see if the mem speeds compatible?