Wow, everyone here has been such a help. Thank you all for your time and thought. And now for my next newbie question. i have a 486 that was pieced together from spare parts lying around. it was given to me with no documentation. running win3.1, and blah blah old stuff. It initially had 4 meg of memory, then another 4 meg was added. The chips are different looking, one is staggered one is not. I still am unsure how to tell if it is parity or non. i wish to add more, possibly 16 meg, but how do i tell? so far, since it's a 486 i'm assuming parity because of the age. but looking on the chips themselves i see that it is 72 pin, and on one of them there are 16 (chips) and the other 12. I had thought that parity would have an odd number of chips on the memory module, so now that makes these non-parity, my bios has a selection for parity error checking, though it is disabled....so what do you all think? installation will be fine and easy (so he says) and everything else fine just how do i tell??? Thank you in advance....very much David A. Abbe [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] _____________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]