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> From: John Rinehart <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: [PCBUILD] FPM vs. EDO memory upgrade
> Date: Monday, July 20, 1998 8:43 AM
>
> And yet Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PC's states on page 803
> paragraph 2 of the 8th edition, "You can install EDO memory in older
systems
> that do not support it because EDO is backward-compatible with standard
(called
> fast page mode) memory."
>
> And Stephen Bigelow in TroubleShooting & Repairing PC Drives & Memory
Systems -
> Second edition states on page 98 par. 2, "You should realize that EDO RAM
can
> be used in non-EDO motherboards, but there will be no performance
improvement."
>
> So who is right??  I would prefer buying EDO memory in case I would
upgrade the
> MB in the future to a chip set that will support it.  But yet if the EDO
will
> not really work in the current system and in fact I do need FPM memory
then I
> will purchase that for the time being.
>
Is the machine a 486 or a Pentium?  I tried this experiment.  I had a
generic 486 motherboard with a 133MHz CPU that used 72-pin SIMMs.  It had
16MB of FPM memory and it was to be upgraded to 32MB.  I tried using EDO
SIMMs and it would boot but would get lots of error messages.  Windows
reported errors in the registry and when I would try to run Internet
Explorer, the machine would crash.  I took out the FPM memory to check for
conflicts between the two types and this made no difference.  This machine
would not run with EDO SIMMs installed.  I believe most Pentium systems
will support the use of FPM SIMMs in addition to EDO but there would be
about a 10-20% performance hit from what I have read.