Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
I have seen computers that had four 500 MB sticks too. It's quite annoying since practically speaking you cannot really reuse them as part of your upgrade.
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So have I. I have a batch of old RAM in a drawer that doesn't work in anything I have now.
The curious part is that older RAM may be more expensive. One machine here is a Fujitsu p2110, an old (circa 2005) notebook that has a 787mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU, IDE4 HD, and a whopping 256MB RAM (of which the Crusoe grabs 16MB off the top for code morphing.)
It came to me with WinXP SP2 installed, and was snail slow, taking 8 minutes to simply boot. No surprise - XP wants 512MB RAM
minimum. I replaced the HD with a bigger one, re-partitioned, and installed Win2K Pro SP4, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS in a quad boot configuration. The object was to see what performance I could wring out of it without throwing money at it. Win2K actually ran more or less acceptably. Linux was tolerable. FreeDOS flew.
Technically speaking, the p2110 could be expanded to 384MB with a daughtercard for the RAM, but while I could still get one, I could get multiple GB of current RAM for what the 128MB module would cost.
To make it more fun, Fujitsu offered an earlier model that had 128MB, and could be expanded with a 256MB daughtercard. I could get that too, and have a 512MB RAM machine, but couldn't find any info on whether the 256MB card would work in the p2110 and successfully expand it, and wasn't willing to spend the money without some assurance of success.
In a moment of pure surprise, I got email from a woman in Britain not long back who had seen my commentary on the machine elsewhere. She decided to give it a shot, bought and installed the 256MB card in her p2110, and it worked as desired. She was pleased. I was moderately astonished.
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Dennis