You can get 72 pin simms still.  They are cheap like all ram now.  You need
to look at your motherboard's chipset (two soldered on square chips, the
northbridge and southbridge, check what's printed on them) for your board's
type.  If you have PCchips, intel FX / intel VX / intel TX, SIS, or just
about anything else other than VIA chipsets, you probably can not use more
than 64 meg of ram without first disabling your external cache.  Cache is an
option you can find in the cmos setup (press the del key when you see the
msg during boot-up, Press del to enter setup).  Disabling external cache
will cancel out any boost you get from 128 meg of ram in almost all single
tasking applications (games, ms office, etc)  The times it won't are
multi-tasking, printing in the background, scanning, faxing, server stuff,
or when you absolutely need the ram, like sound and graphics editing.
The VIA models VPXa, VPXb, VP+ and VP2 will all except 128 meg ram with the
external cache enabled.
Failure to properly set the cache will cause blue screen crashes, and after
a couple of those, registry corruption.  One of the surest ways to prove
cache misbehavior in fact, was when friends would call and say they had to
reinstall windows (because of the registry problem), but the install keeps
stopping at the same place (the place when Win9x started loading all the
32bit drivers.)  As soon as I had them disable cache, the windows install
would finish successfully and the blue screens would go away.
You need to install ram in pairs, so your best choices are two 32 meg simms
or 2 64 meg simms.  Several reputable memory dealers sell through ebay, or
you can try www.pricewatch.com
More than 128 meg is only useful on if you put windows NT or linux on this.
There is really nothing practical you can do with a pentium class pc now
days, as a client, that would use more ram.

I would save my money, and get two 32 meg simms.  Take all four of the old
simms out so you don't have to worry about the cache setting, and that's
that.
Tom Turak
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Elsworth [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 4:08 PM


What was the largest capacity (size) 72 pin memory modules offered?
I've got an older Pentium I box that has four slots that currently
have an 8 MByte RAM module in each slot.  I'd like to increase the
memory, but don't know what the largest 72 pin RAM memory modules were
that was made.  I'd like to go up to at least 64 MBytes, but, if
possible, to 128 MBytes, if such memory is still available.

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