On Wednesday 01 November 2006 14:34, Doug McGarrett wrote:
I just bought a 512 M memory card from Crucial, after reading on their FAQ page that with modern computers, you can add a different size ram board to whatever is in there now. (If it turns out not to work, I'll pull out the 128 M and leave the 512 M.) So, if you buy a 512 M ram, you "should" be able to plug it in alongside the 256, and have 768 M.
Arrrg. As any good pirate would say. This is true in general for most 'modern' PC and some Mac systems. Even back in the day of the 286, 386 and 486 you had to know your mainboard to be able to mix various speeds and sizes of RAM. I have PCs and Macs that I can mix various size DIMMs from 4, 8, 16MB through 128, 256 and 512MB of PC100, PC133 speeds. They will POST and boot but any compute intensive applications can cause all kinds of troubleshooting hilarity to ensue. Any weirdness or strange behavior exhibited during operations would lead me to suggest pulling the oldest, slowest memory and seeing if everything smooths out with the newest, fastest. If all is OK, leave out the old stuff.
Their staff is knowledgeable, so if you read off the numbers on your existing RAM, they should be able to tell you if this will work. They'd really like to know the name of the computer, or the MOBO mfr., but they seem to be able to work around it, if you don't know. Their 800 number is 1-800-336-8915, 7am to 8pm mountain time, weekdays, 10am to 2pm Saturdays. They are owned by, and sell, Micron.
Agreed. Crucial is good, have excellent advice, support and knowledge.
Good luck, whatever you decide.
--wa2say
The RAM came and I installed it alongside the old, and it works. Is there a way to verify that the system is using it? The box does seem faster.
In KDE go to System, Monitor, Memory. htop is another top style system monitor that gives a colored system status overview. And decode-dimms.pl from the sensors program. Stan