Skip to Main Content
PC Hacks
book

PC Hacks

by Jim Aspinwall
October 2004
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 44m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PC Hacks

Hack #31. Recognize Memory Limitations

Sometimes your system board and BIOS are your biggest limitations when it comes to adding more RAM—either a BIOS upgrade or a new system board is the answer.

When is any amount of RAM too much? When your system's sockets, BIOS, or chipset cannot address more than 256 MB, 512 MB, 640 MB, or more of RAM chips. System boards with three or four 72-pin SIMM (Single Inline Memory Module) sockets ordinarily will not accommodate more than four 32 MB (4 32 = 128 MB) or four 64 MB (4 64 = 256 MB) sticks of RAM.

So stuff as much RAM in the system as you have available, and determine from startup if the system recognizes it or not. If you install more RAM than the system can handle, save the RAM for another system that can use the same type of RAM.

Your old 486, Pentium I, or Pentium II vintage system may present you with a chipset or BIOS limitation that does not support as much RAM as you can physically install. Check the manual for your system board or look it up on the Web to see how much RAM the board will support. These limitations may be imposed by chipset design assumptions that no one would ever get their hands on that much RAM, much less have an operating system or program that could use it. If the chipset on your system board is capable of handling more memory, the limitation may be in your BIOS.

If you think that a BIOS upgrade might help accommodate more RAM, first scour the Internet for tips and advice to see if anyone else has successfully ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Car PC Hacks

Car PC Hacks

Damien Stolarz
Wireless Hacks

Wireless Hacks

Rob Flickenger
Linux® Kernel Primer, The: A Top-Down Approach for x86 and PowerPC Architectures

Linux® Kernel Primer, The: A Top-Down Approach for x86 and PowerPC Architectures

Claudia Salzberg Rodriguez, Gordon Fischer, Steven Smolski

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007485Errata Page