On 21 May 99, at 13:18, Jon Schwartz wrote:

> After installing two 32 meg sticks of 72-pin EDO RAM in addition to the
> existing two 16 megs sticks, I was delighted to see the following:
>
> "Memory address line failure at 030A0510, read F4F5F5F5 expecting F5F5F5F5.
>  Decreasing available memory"
>
> Total meg count should be 96 but the PC only recognizes 80.  I've swapped
> the sticks around in the slots with no improvement.  80 megs makes it quite
> snappy but I'm greedy for the full count.  Where did I go wrong?

  Apparently, at least one bit returned a 0 value when a 1 had been stored in
it.  In the most general case, this memory fails to perform its function; it
is broken, defective, failing, BAD.

  It's possible that it isn't actually dead, just slow.  You haven't told us
the speed of the modules, or the bus speed of your system, so it's hard to
guess how likely that is.
  Since you didn't see this before, odds are that the failing location is in
the new SIMMs, not the old.  Make sure it goes away if you take the new out,
and that it is present even if you take the old out leaving just the new.

  32MB is a double-sided/double-density/double-banked size for 72-pin SIMMs,
and as such is not supported by some motherboards, which may only be happy
with 4MB, 16MB and 64MB sizes.  Check your motherboard manual (you haven't
told us the type...) to see if this could apply.

  Some boards of similar vintage to yours may suffer as much as a 15%
performance hit if more than 64MB of RAM is installed.  You might prefer not
to risk that....


David G

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