• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

OLD computer only reading half the memory

D

DellAxim

Gawd
Joined
Feb 14, 2003
Messages
999
A few days ago I got a pile of old memory for free. Mostly SIMMs. Mostly 128mb pairs...worth more than you'd think on ebay. :D I'm trying to test them, and I'm having several problems...

First of all, I tested them with an old motherboard which has an AT keyboard port. I don't have an AT keyboard, so I could only test to see if they post or not, and see what size they are.

So, today I dug my old Packard Bell out of the closet. Can't believe I didn't throw this thing away yet. It has a PS/2 keyboard port and SIMM slots, so I can test the memory with memtest. The problem is, every peice of memory I put in shows up as half or less of it's actual size.

Example: 128mb shows up as 64mb, 64mb shows up as 32mb, and some 128mb shows up as 32mb.

Why?! :confused: :rolleyes:
 
well I wasn't that much into hardware during the days of SIMM memory.. but I think that you have to put them in pairs to get them work properly..
 
yeah, you have to put them in pairs.
and also there's two diff voltages ratings for simms
either 3.3 v or 5v and diff mobos support diff voltages.
 
I thought there were some older slots out there that only read 1 side of the stick, My moms old gateway was like that.
 
Are the copper connects on them in good shape? If a few of them are very scratched up, you could be getting a signal that there is a module there, but it is empty because it can't access the chips.

This happened with a pc133 chip I have after years of sliding it in and out of DIMM slots. The bios would recognise it, but no OS would see it there as memory, yet there was no boot errors using it.
 
Also with simms it seems that if some of the ram goes bad, the mobo reads only the good ram.

~Adam
 
Most likely the mobo simply does not support modules of that size.

This was very common in the days of SIMM.

For example, I have a old Acer K6233 machine that uses 72-pin SIMM.

It has 4 slots, each slot can only accept a module up to 32MB in size. Any bigger and it ethier won't detect at all, won't POST, or will detect a size such as 4, 8, 16MB, etc....

You also have the issue of wethier or not the RAM is of FPM or EDO variety (they are not interchangable!) You also have to consider access time. For SIMMs to work properly, the type and access time must match what the motherboard supports!

FPM and higher Access times are common for older 30-pin systems, while EDO is more common on "newer" 72-pin systems.

I'm happy we moved to DIMM now... Its not quite as picky as SIMM!!!
 
tcraig_4096 said:
Are the copper connects on them in good shape? If a few of them are very scratched up, you could be getting a signal that there is a module there, but it is empty because it can't access the chips.
Click to expand...

Yeah, they're ok. They all worked fine in my other test computer, and I tried like 8 pairs in this computer. None worked. I guess it's just not able to read the big memory. Should have expected that of a packard bell. :rolleyes:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top