Need help with and old Dell

Lmandrake · Post by **Lmandrake** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 7:08 pm

I have an old Dell latitude C600 with 128 mb of PC100. I wanted to upgrade the ram and the max for this model is 512 total in two 256 mb sticks. I got two sticks with the following specs:

Single 256MB PC100 144PIN SODIMM for Laptops / Notebooks
Chip Configuration: 32X64
Unbuffered, Non Ecc, Non Registered

Neither stick shows up in either slot when I install and try to boot. The old 128 mb stick works fine.

I can't find anything on the dell site other than "buy our memory"

Any tips, directions to good forums etc. would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

wvjohn · Post by **wvjohn** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 7:19 pm

dunno, maybe try 1 old 1 new - see if it picks it up or a bios flash if you could find the right one

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 8:39 pm

if it has a service tag sometimes you can use it to look up the specs. ive done it b4.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Wed Oct 29, 2008 1:14 am

If it helps, from Crucial:
http://www.crucial.com/search/searchres ... ude%20C600

Sometimes older computers get picky, more so with high-density type. Other times it just simply won't work even though there is no reason that it should not. At least Crucial makes a guarantee of compatibility.

Lmandrake · Post by **Lmandrake** » Wed Oct 29, 2008 5:58 am

It may be that it will not read high density ram and needs low density. A lot of googling got me to a thread on dslreports.com that suggests that is the issue.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:16 am

There were a lot of issues with PC100/PC133 and compatibilities - especially on laptops.

It's hit or miss unless you order memory that is guaranteed to work on it.

You best bet is to buy directly from Crucial, but you don't really want to spend too much money on that old a lappy either.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:35 am

Actually, you want to avoid high density RAM for most any laptop. High density ram barely works with any laptop (though I have had luck with Toshibas). The low density ram is pretty high in price usually (about double). I've had problems even when I bought from sellers on ebay claiming to have low density ram. The best way to tell is that the ram will have 16 chips total (8 on each side).