Background story: feel free to skip all this bit in italics

A couple of weeks ago my work laptop died with horrific memory corruption. I had hopes of temporarily reviving it with some spare laptop memory I had kicking around my spares box, but to no avail (my spare SO-DIMMs are all DDR3, and the laptop is DDR4).

As luck would have it the laptop got shunted over to central support who happened to have a spare DDR4 SO-DIMM lying around and so my laptop was only out of action for about a day.

But one side-effect of me digging around in my spares box was that I realised just how much spare laptop memory I have kicking around. I've got a number of DDR3-compatible CPUs, and a lot of DDR3 memory, but the CPUs are desktop and the memory is SO-DIMMs. A quick google convinced me that sourcing native SO-DIMM motherboards for the combinations would be way too expensive to be viable, but then it occurred to me that, since motherboards can be made with the same socket BUT either DIMM or SO-DIMM slots, the two formats really should be compatible and just maybe I could source adapters: and sure enough, it's relatively easy to source adapters that take a SO-DIMM and fit in a standard DIMM slot. Which means that I could - at a reasonable price - upgrade the memory capacity on a number of my old desktops, potentially giving them a significant lease of life.


So, question here - has anyone ever used SO-DIMM to DIMM adapters? Do they just work? Any potential pitfalls that might not be immediately obvious...