help with new ram install, please

[bartolomo]

i have a duron 850, chaintech m.b. with 256 meg ram running fine. i bought a new stick of ram, 256 pc133, just like the other one and put it in. i cleared the cmos and started--everything looked good. when i ran norton diag., the memory failed. then i got a blue screen saying 'system memory dangerously low'. what is going on? thanks for the help.

[Bovon]

Welcome to SysOpt.

The second stick could be bad. The resources low thing is a generic message. Try the new stick by its self and see what happens. Both sticks should be the same kind. ie...PC 133 or PC 100 (if your bus speed is 100 mhz or less..it dosn't matter) and the type should be the same also..ie..unbuffered, non parity, or ECC...or registered. I don't believe you can mix types...and your motherboard 'probably' takes unbuffered, non parity.

BTW, if you do not know for sure what kind and type of ram you have, you may need a program to analyze and tell you what it is.

[BipolarBill]

This may help:

http://www.aida32.hu/aida32.php

[bartolomo]

Thanks to both Bovon and BipolarBill. I dl'ed aida32 and will play around with it. It looks fantastic. Btw, I just discovered this site and will definitely be checking it out routinely. Take care and thanks again.

Joe

[Bovon]

Our pleasure bartolomo/Joe. Stop by often, and be sure to let us know if you get it worked out. If not, then post a follow up so that we all can learn.

When running the Ada32 diagnostics application, you may want to run it with each ram module separately, if the machine will boot with each one by its self...then study what the ram report says.

You say that the new module is the same as the old...are you sure?..ECC, Registered and Non parity-unbuffered look alike. Are there 8 chips per side or maybe 9?..are there chips on both sides of the module, or only one side?