Zenbook Surgery

I bought an ASUS Zenbook UX32VD! My toughest criteria in picking an ultrabook was that I need an NVIDIA graphics card for parallel computing. I think it's awesome that I have this parallel computing power in a light little ultrabook! Here are the specs as it arrived, but I quickly did some surgery to upgrade it!

Summary

Screen Size	13.3 inches
Screen Resolution	1366 x 768
Max Screen Resolution	1920x1080 pixels
Processor	1.9 GHz Core i7-3517U
RAM	4 GB DDR3
Memory Speed	1600 MHz
Hard Drive	500 GB
Graphics Coprocessor	NVIDIA_GeForce_GT_620M
Chipset Brand	Intel, NVIDIA
Wireless Type	802.11bgn
Number of USB 3.0 Ports	3

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Other Technical Details

Brand Name	Asus
Series	UX32VD
Item model number	UX32VD-DH71
Hardware Platform	PC
Operating System	Windows 8
Item Weight	3.2 pounds
Item Dimensions L x W x H	12.80 x 8.78 x 0.71 inches
Color	Silver Aluminum
Processor Brand	Intel
Processor Count	2
Computer Memory Type	DDR3 SDRAM
Flash Memory Size	24
Hard Drive Interface	Serial ATA
Hard Drive Rotational Speed	5400 RPM
Optical Drive Type	No
Audio-out Ports (#)	1
Battery Type	Lithium Polymer (LiPo)
Batteries:	1 Lithium ion batteries required. (included)

I had  never opened up a laptop before, but I wanted to upgrade the HD to completely SSD and replace one of the 2GB RAM sticks with an 8GB stick for a total of 10GB of RAM. (good instructions here: http://youtu.be/8xC-osS0scU) I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on this new hard drive and had no trouble booting!

Checked the ram with this terminal command:
free -m
and I have 9.999 GB. It's recognizing the new RAM!

When it was installing it asked if I wanted to use the 250.1 GB drive. So, it's recognizing that too!