OT: Memory issues

From: Mzthompson_at_aol.com <(Mzthompson_at_aol.com)>
Date: Sat Mar 16 10:26:28 2002

I say OT because some of this applies to newer machines, but I
thought it might me worth sharing.

I was in a tinkering mood yesterday. I had recently pulled the 256 mb
(three dinky DIMMS) from a Pentium II and put in two 256 mb sticks.
My motherboard docs state a max of 512 mb, but now I got a spare memory
socket and could not resist. I stuck another 32 mb in and fired it up.
The BIOS self test ran OK, and it booted to DOS find. But when I brought
Microslop Windoze 95, I learned the true meaning of Windoze. You could
click on the start button, take a drink of coffee, light up a smoke, and
maybe, just maybe, the start menu would appear by the time you did that.
A whole new meaning to the word slow.

Needless to say, I pulled the 32 mb. Windoze returned to its 'normal'
speed.

Not content to stop there, I decided to up the size of the ramdisk from
16 mb to 32 mb. Since I boot to the DOS prompt, it was easy to catch the
error stating invalid ramdisk parameter. So I took it back to 16 mb and
starting incrementing it. I got all the way to 30 mb with no problems,
or so I thought. I had only booted to DOS, and not brought up Win95
during the time. With a 30 mb ramdisk I brought it up. My display settings
were changed and the display adapter was complaining. I returned the
ramdisk to 16 mb and all returned to normal.

I found nothing on a specific limit on a ramdisk in any docs I looked
at. I have used a ramdisk since my XT days. Now it is almost like they
don't want us to know about it.

Any thoughts?

----------------------------------------
I also have been trying to add some memory to an old Gateway 486/33 machine
I use for utility things. It already has 16 mb. I've tried several
combinations of SIMMS all meeting GW requirements (36 bit parity 70 ns).
It comes down to no matter what combination I put in, nor how I set the
memory dip switches, it won't recognize anything beyond 16 mb. I have
the manual of this beast, and it clearly states it is expandable to 64 mb.


----------------------------------------
And finally, I was confused by the recent posting on the DEC 3000/300.
The reason was that someone handed me a bag of DEC SIMMS some time back
and I thought they were for a 3000 but the descriptions in the recent
posting dod not jive with what I had. The ones I have are 100 pin,
10 chip, 70ns and are a 4 mb module with room for another 4 mb on the
back. It would seem that mine are for the 3000/400 and maybe higher.


Mike
Received on Sat Mar 16 2002 - 10:26:28 GMT