I have recently changed jobs, and as part of my standard kit when I joined was a brand new HP Elitebook 8460p.  Not a bad system, a pretty peppy Intel Core i5, and a Sandy Bridge chipset. 

It came with 4G of Ram, and our standard Win 7 x64 image.  

SHould be fine, right?  But from day one, the perfomance has been crappy.  Lots of weirdness, long lags, and losing responsiveness.  I was about to toss it into Support hell to complain, then I noticed an odd fact. 

This laptop comes with 4G by default. But instead of it being two 2G SODIMMS, it is one 4G SODIMM. Anybody with half a brain knows that to effectively achieve system performance, you need both banks of memory populated.

I can understand why they do this. Most people would just buy the second 4G SODIMM, and be done with it.  But, to save $20 (I paid $20.90 for a second SODIMM) it seems like a bad decision.  On a laptop that retails for $1500 (it is a business class system with support), this is really annoying.

Geoff’s new rules:

• Thou shalt not ship a computer without the SODIMMS to complete an interleaved memory bank.  Just don’t do it.
• Thou shalt not ship an x64 OS without a minimum of 8G ram.  This really needs to become the standard.  Win 7 is MUCh happier with 8G (or even better 16G).