Ram upgrade not working so good...

[AndyL]

G'day folks,

IE8 forced me to finally get off my arse and upgrade the ram on this gateway m-6822 laptop... Opened her up, PC2-5300S - checked with gateway - 4gig max of pc2 5300 ram - went to memory express, picked up a pair of 2gig patriot PC2-5300 Sodimms.

Installed them - get the bios boot screen, then hangs with just a flashing cursor in the top left corner... Checked and rechecked installation, swapped the order; no change. So I put one of the 512mb sticks in the upper slot - no change, lower slot - it boots, swapped the sodimms back and forth - both work fine and memtests fine.

Can anyone enlighten me - as I wait for the st*pid gateway tech support folks in india to call me back... :facepalm:

Thanks in advance,

Andy

[Jericho99]

hmm i just went to buy the exact same memory.... same shit happened to me and my newer ibm laptop.... maybe they selling shitty patriot sticks.

[Mibz]

I bought the same Patriot sticks last week (These (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX19312(ME).aspx)) and installed them in a client's Toshiba laptop, worked fine.

[B4tMan]

put old RAM in upper slot and tell us what happens

does it boot now ?

[AndyL]

wont boot with the old ram in the upper slot either (mentioned in original post)

[AndyL]

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12546_102-0.html?threadID=294232

Vista 32 can only support up to 3.5gig of ram... no more...

[Jericho99]

as long as ur laptop can support it then it should at least boot into windows where you will only see 3.5 out of the 4. Its probably a compatibility issue with the ram. And one memory must be in the bottom slot at least usually.

[Mibz]

Yeah dude, you can put 12 GB of RAM into a Vista 32-bit machine and it'll just recognize 3.5 GB. If the BIOS isn't recognizing it then a compatibility issue is what I'd expect. I dunno about Gateway, but I know HPs and Compaqs are pretty picky about their hardware, it would be something to look in to.

[AndyL]

Bios sees it fine - seems to be a vista issue - as i can boot linux livecd's and memtest with the 4gigs installed... Just vista blows chunks... Why am I not surprised...

[Boat]

Edit: Yea I would check the memory compatibility on their website if you can) and just return the other memory.