Five minute job, but watch your warranty!
The Acer Revo RL80 is an awesome little nettop machine that can be really useful in a modern living room. Unfortunately the cheapest UK models only come with 2GB of RAM, which can cause your system to slow if you’re running multiple applications at once.
Fortunately, upgrading the RAM is quite a simple task, though it’s worth pointing out that Acer will consider the warranty null and void once the little sticker on the side has been tampered with.
First of all you’re going to need to buy a RAM upgrade kit. I settled on a 4GB kit from Crucial, as I didn’t need that much extra memory for my system. You’re going to need DDR3-1333 SODIMM memory, which is available from pretty much any online supplier.
The first step is to remove all cables from the Revo and lay it flat on your work surface. Under no circumstances do you want to be working on this system while it’s still connected to its power supply.
At the rear of the unit you’ll spot a black screw, just above the HDMI jack.
Once this is removed, you should be able to pry the plastic lid off of the casing. To do this you’ll need to place a flat blade screwdriver in the notch at the back and twist gently. The lid is only secured with plastic clips so should ping off quite cleanly.
Once off you’ll find a metal plate covering the vital components with four black screws holding it down.
Remove the screws and the metal plate will lift straight off, revealing the Revo mainboard, hard disk and the two memory slots shown here on the right hand side.
Close up you can see that the RAM boards and held in place by spring loaded retention clips either side of them. If you pull back on the clips gently you’ll find that the RAM boards will spring loose and can then be pulled away from the socket.
Depending on your particular model you might find a single 2GB card, or 2 x 1GB cards. Remove one or both and then install your new cards in place by pushing them in to the slot and then pushing down on them to secure them in place.
Once you’ve installed the new RAM cards you just need to work in reverse to re-assemble the Revo. When placing the metal plate back it’s important to make sure that it’s correctly located on the plastic locators.
Once you’ve got your Revo back in one piece, fire it up and then hit the DEL key on your keyboard in order to access the BIOS. Within the BIOS you should be able to confirm that the RAM you’ve installed is recognised by your system. This can also be confirmed by checking system preferences within your operating system.