Laptop RAM Woes

Laptop RAM is a pain point for me. I've inexplicably never had a RAM upgrade work right out of the box for a laptop... Maybe I'm just unlucky. I've never had this happen on desktop though.

Part 1: HP Envy x360

This starts with an HP Envy x360 Laptop (15m-dr1012dx). The device came with 12GB of DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz. (A 4GB and 8GB stick)

The plan was simple. I bought 2 sticks of TeamGroup 16GB RAM sticks at 3200MHz. (Amazon Link)

I immediately ran into issues. The laptop would not POST. After some fiddling with it, I ended up swapping the 2 (identical) RAM sticks several times, causing it to randomly boot. OK I guess.

This gets considerably more confusing though. If, at a later date, you remove one of the RAM sticks, and put it back in – The laptop will again not POST. You must perform the swapping of the 2 sticks (I want to again stress, these are identical sticks) an unspecified amount of times, until it will magically POST again.

I'll take partial blame for this, I bought 3200MHz sticks instead of 2666Mhz sticks (The CPU runs the RAM at 2666MHz) I expected it to just run the RAM at the supported lower speed of the CPU. I'm told this is not the case? It did do exactly that anyway. I guess I'll never know if this was the reason for the weird swapping ritual required to POST.

Part 2: Lenovo E14

My second experience with this is with the Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 (20TA004MUS). This device came with a single stick of 16GB 3200MHz RAM. Ideally I could have just plucked the 2 sticks out of my old laptop, and put them in the new laptop. However, in Lenovo's infinite wisdom, they put only a single DIMM.

Knowing the issues I had with my previous laptop, I made sure to get the right speed. I bought a single stick of Corsair 32GB RAM at 3200Mhz. (Amazon Link)

I expected this to just work. It did not. The laptop failed to POST, seemingly enter a boot loop. Since I couldn't swap sticks or anything, I just left it like that for 30 minutes, with no luck.

Given I made sure to get the proper speed and what not, I was entirely lost on why this didn't work. Someone on Reddit had this issue on an older model, and seemed to resolve it with a different brand.
So I go to Micro Center looking for some Crucial brand RAM, which they didn't seem to have on hand in 32GB DDR4 SODIMM. I ended up buying some Patriot brand RAM (Micro Center link) (Amazon link)

The specs are identical to the Corsair brand RAM, but for whatever reason this works perfectly first try.

I'm not quite sure why this worked with this brand. I can't really do diagnostics on a device that, when inserted causes the machine to not POST.

Final words

I don't think this is an issue of some brands being better than other brands, as this isn't a problem that (in my experience) exists on desktop. Maybe it has to do with laptop chipsets. I'm not sure. I'd love to see an in-depth investigation in what is going on here.