Today, I received two Corsair Value Select 4Gb DDR SO-DIMMs (from overclock.co.uk) for my aging HP 6910p to give it the extra lease of life to keep it going until the end of 2010.  And here is the proof that Windows 7 64-bit happily sees all 8Gb,

There are no 4Gb modules are officially supported for the HP 6910p (they didn’t exist when it was first build).  I was taking a bit of a gamble, and relying on the UK distance selling regulations which meant that even if they didn’t work I’d be able to send them back, getting a full refund and only paying for the return postage. I’d read Keith Comb’s blog back in 2008, (http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2008/07/05/loading-a-hp-6910p-with-8gb-of-ram.aspx) where he mentioned ‘trying’ out 4Gb samples of SO-DIMMs in a HP 6910p laptop, but there still appears to be no mentions of running this configuration in any other blog.

Seeing how the 8Gb of memory is used is made easier with the new Resource Monitor available in Windows 7.  With two copies of Visual Studio 2008, Outlook, Firefox (with 30+ tabs), TweetDeck (an infamous memory hog) and VMWare workstation running a virtual machine allocated with 2Gb of memory, you might have no ‘free’ memory remaining, but the standby memory is an awesome 2.4Gb, and once the VM is up and running the Hard Faults/sec hovers around zero,

It’s the page fault figure which really counts, because reducing that value means that you are preventing the Windows 7 system drive from being used for virtual memory paging operations.  Even after only a few hours of use it’s noticeable that disc access has been reduced and applications feel more responsive and ‘snappy’. 

I did consider the option of purchasing an SSD to replace the main drive, rather than go for 8Gb of RAM, but I think I’ve probably made the correct decision. Given my hobby topic of virtualisation, I take the view that you can never have too much memory.  

It was also a decision made easier by the price differential between 8Gb of RAM compared to a decent size SSD.  In the 18 months since Keith Comb tested the first 4Gb SO-DIMMS they have plummeted in price, at just under £100 per 4Gb, they are around a fifth of the price when launched.

So if you ever wondered if a HP 6910p can handle 8Gb, now you know.