gateway memory help!!!

[lassie]

My sis has an old 1995 "P5-120" Gateway with a 32 ram dimm chip and wanted to bump up the mem. I removed the old and installed the newly bought stick of 128 pc133 dimm and zippo, (needless to say) NO bootup.
does Gateway have some kind of special memory, looks like a normal stick of dimm to me.
I realize it's old but thought maybe someone here may have had experience with one of these and i can't find the on-line manual at gateway.

Thanks Gang
Lassie

 

[Poochy]

It doesn't look like this mobo can take a 128meg stick. According to the Crucial memory selector thingamajabber, the largest stick you can put in is a 64meg EDO or 32meg SDRAM. Note the "Notes" part as well about mixing EDO and SDRAM.

 

[lassie]

??EDO must be simm..right?
This has (2) dimm slots, one of which has a 32meg stick. Surely it must take more than 32 megs....Huh??

Thanks
Lassie

 

[LucJoe]

what? are you sure its a P5-120? That was my first computer and the one I had was EDO SIMM only. 4 slots (2 pairs), and it only came with 8 megs of ram, are you sure we're talking about the same computer? I got it up to 80 megs of ram before I stopped using it. Maybe Gateway made 2 different models?

 

[Geekbabe]

A lot of those Gateway's have weird memory limitations,I fixed one were I could use either 64 mg EDO Dimms or 32 mg Sdram dimms.. I went with the sdram because EDO Dimms(yes,there is 168 pin EDO) were outragous in price and the customer planned on using the ram when she had me build her another system.

 

[lassie]

Yep, it's got dimm and the stick in there add's up to 32 megs. Sooo, do you mean I could add another 32 meg stick and thats all ??

Thanks Again
Lassie

 

[Geekbabe]

Afraid so, you either add another 32 mg stick of sdram or junk that stick and switch over to EDO Dimms.

 

[lassie]

Wow..gads, that crucial memory site is a great resource isn't it.

Thanks for that tip.

Lassie

 

[lassie]

Is there any way to tell if this 32 meg stick is EDO or not ?? the lable reads "HB526A464EN-10
9652 XMO770
make in japan"

And thats about it.

Lassie

 

[Geekbabe]

That's a 32 mg Sdram stick,I got the info by plugging in
HB526A464EN-10 into the search engine at Goggle


.

 

[Poochy]

Is there any way to tell if this 32 meg stick is EDO or not ?? the lable reads "HB526A464EN-10 9652 XMO770 make in japan"

A search of "HB526A464EN-10" with Google shows that it's probably a Hitachi 32meg SDRAM DIMM.

 

[lassie]

Appricate all the help and the info.

Many Thanks
Lassie

I'm off tomm. to change that 128 for a 32 dimm

 

[Nack]

64MB should be plenty for anything you are going to do with a P120 anyway. About all you can use that for is word processing and maybe some rudimentary kids games (that don't require graphics). Also, check to see how much memory your motherboard's chipset can cache. It might not be worth putting in more than 64MB in any case, even if you could.

My advice (if you are on a really tight budget) would be to buy a nice refurb PIII board ($29 bucks) a reasonably fast celeron processor, which is a Pentium III processor with 128k L2 cache instead of 256k l2 cache, (another $40), a cheap-o ATX case (another $25), $20 graphics board and rip the P120 up for parts (cd-rom, floppy, cables, keyboard, mouse, hard drive (if worth saving) etc. You will end up with a computer 5 times as fast, for about $100. Shove that 128MB SDRAM dimm (that you probably can't return) in that computer, and you will have a respectable machine that you can do just about anything you want to do on really well, except maybe high-end gaming and serious photo editing.

If you are not on a really tight budget, the P120 is a tax donation, as there probably isn't anything in it that is TRULY worth saving (well, except maybe the floppy drive) to put in a new rig. Get rid of it, and buy/build (preferably build) something that will run modern software.

Nack

 

[Musicman6425]

Goto Gateway Site...
It should tell you exactly what that Mobo can handle.