Laptop ram issue & questions.

My Son has an HP Probook 430 G7 with 2 x 8gb 2666 Samsung ram sticks as his school laptop. Being a 14 year old boy, you can imagine the abuse it gets........
This week it started beeping like an evacuation alarm.
Chased the codes & comes up as a ram issue.
Removed & refit ram, swapped sticks, cleaned & checked connection. Eventually got it to boot. Figured it was just bad connections & reseat fixed it.
Same issue again today. Had a mess with it & found one side on the Motherboard is playing up. It runs fine with either stick of ram in the left side, but won't run with either in the right.

SO... I have it running with a single stick of 8gb ram to get him through tomorrow.

My long winded questions are,
Is it worth upgrading to a single 16gb stick of ram?
It's currently using 2666, Can I use 3200 & is there any benefit in doing so?

Anything else I should be aware of?
Thanks.

 

does it run ok with 8gb ?
unless his into something heavy, see how it goes
maybe if you see a cheap 1 grab it.
doubt speed would either for basic stuff.

what's in his history

 

have you ran a memory test to see if its a bad stick of RAM? even if it works on only a single side, it maybe still dud sticks of ram.

 

That's what I've done for now. Seems to be ok. This is his school computer so noting to worry about on that. His home PC could be a different matter.......

I swapped them several times & both work in the same slot, and both play up in the other. I'm pretty sure it's a Motherboard issue with that slot.

 

Could be one of the contacts is bent / deformed in the ram slot, which is causing the error.

It's probably sodium ddr3 at a random guess.
Extra ram will allow multiple programs to be open and running concurrently and allow him to alt+tab through them quickly. Limiting to 8gb is not the end of thr world.

Also, I have an older laptop I still use, came with 8gb, claimed Max expandable to 16gb, and it's happily running 32gb and a ssd drive. It's reasonably snappy (with linux) and daily usable.

 

I suspect that's what it is. Just a bad contact.
It's been working fine for 2 days with a single stick in so it'll be right as is for now.
Thanks all.