since your laptop required such extensive work, it's very possible they
simply shipped you back a reconditioned laptop of the same model to save
time, perhaps swapping your hard drive into the "new" one, but not thinking
to check for extra RAM and such. I doubt they would go to the bother of
intentionally stealing you RAM, they can get it much cheaper than you or I
can! Most likely it was an honest mistake, but now there's no way either of
you can prove to the other what happened. An expensive lesson, but I'm not
sure it's fair to fault their service center. Frankly, I think it would have
been easier in the long run for them to just ship you a strip of RAM and be
done with it!....

Marvin, in Atlanta
m9876c at yahoo dot com