[SGVLUG] Laptop memory question...

[Tom Emerson]

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Last week I installed SuSE 10.1, but something seemed a bit "sluggish"
about it that didn't match up with what I expected (while I expected
/some/ slowing due to an ever-bloating KDE, this was more than I
expected...)  It turns out one of my memory modules is "going bad", so I
was only running on 1/2 of the memory (effectively, 256 meg)

This got me to thinking -- while I remember some time back it seemed
every laptop manufacturer had their own proprietary memory scheme (thus
forcing you to buy your upgrades from them), I got this about the time
when laptops were starting to "standardize" on their memory, and it
/looks/ like it has 144-pin "SO-DIMM"s.  I checked with the folks I
bought the laptop from, and they pointed me to a spec page that says the
max memory for this system is 512, but I wonder about that.  512 may
certainly have been "the largest" SO-DIMM available at the time, but a
quick check at Fry's shows that I can get 512 meg modules now (or,
rather, two for a total of 1 gig)

BUT... the guys who sold the laptop are adamant that the laptop will NOT
support more than 512 meg -- "that is all it was designed for".  Again,
I'm thinking that may have been the case when they sold it, but things
may have improved since then.  The only other factor here is that the
motherboard uses the bx440 chipset -- can anyone confirm or deny that
512 is the max that this chipset will support?  Or can anyone confirm
these guys are blowing smoke about how much memory it will support? (or
that perhaps 256 meg modules really are the largest that this system
might recognize...)

Of course, it may simply be time to consider a new laptop, but I think
there is still some life in this one yet...


Tom

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