Won't take any memory, what is up??????

[cmputrskillme]

Ok, a customer of mine wants to add RAM to his system. He's currently got a stick of 128MB PC100 RAM in there. He's running ME and it is a Dell System, Dimension XPS-T 700R. I've tried both PC100 and 133 in it and both give an error that they failed/cant read in sector?section? 1 or something to that effect. Both sticks said the same thing, they were new and from the distributor so I know they are both fine. We removed original stick and then left it in there, switched banks, you name it, we tried it. It recognizes it in the bios in slot 2 as 512 but comes up with the error on cold boot.

Aside from having the man pay Dell just to get information, (his warranty is up) how do I find out why the 512 sticks (Kingston) I put in there won't work? Has anyone had this problem?

As always thanks in advance,
Sharon

[Conan]

Run memtest86 with each stick:
http://www.memtest.org/

[sydspirit]

Went to crucial.com and according to their site the most your friends puter will support is 768MB on 3 banks or 256MB/bank. He will have to buy 2x256MB to get 512MB system ram. Here is a link to the crucial page: http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.asp?Mfr%2BProductline=Dell%2BDimension+XPS+Series&mfr=Dell&cat=RAM&model=Dimension+XPS+T+Series&submit=Go

[rik]

Also from the Dell website:

NOTE: Only 100-MHz DIMMs are supported. The system can include both ECC and non-ECC memory; however, to support ECC, all installed DIMMs must be ECC-capable. ECC DIMMs have an odd number of memory chips on the module and non-ECC DIMMs have an even number of chips.

This is from the users guides on that particular system. It can be found here:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dkub/specs.htm

[cmputrskillme]

Thanks a bunch guys! I contacted this gentleman and let him know that he will have to purchase two 256MB sticks and he says "go ahead and do what you need to do." Guess he doesn't care how much it costs, or the fact that he has paid me about $500 in the past 6 months to fix various problems on this thing. I told him he should just buy a new one, he replied that he "has no plans to do so."

Ok, I'll get to ordering that ram!


Thanks again for the info!

Sharon