I have a old HP 6630 that has 256 M of ram and has had a 40 G 7200 rpm hard drive and Windows XP installed on it.It runs fine but I want to give it to my grandson to play games on and was tinking of adding more ram but the paper work that came with it say 256 M max. It uses PC 100 ram. I was wonder what would be the problem if I up graded it to 512 M of PC100 or if it would do any good as far as proformace. I don't want to mess up this computer because it does a good job as is. Any sugestion would be appriated.

Funny thing about some of these older Hp & Compaq systems. their manuals state ram limits but sometimes they will work with more than the supposed maximum. Sometimes though they won't. One thing will be certain. Yours will not handle a 512mb single stick. It MAY work with two sticks of 256 as long as it's low density. I have an old Compaq deskpro with a Piii 500 and the manual says ram limit is 256 over two slots. It works perfectly with the original 128mb PC100 single stick plus a stick of 256mb low density double-sided PC133. I'm sure it would work with two 256 sticks. There is only one way to be sure and that's to try it. It's unlikely that you would damage anything by trying to boot with extra ram. Worst case is it would not boot at all. Possible outcome is it will boot but not read all ram. In either of these events just restore the original configuration. I have seen similar questions in the past where respondents recommend updating the bios. Check on the HP support site to see if there is any bios upgrade that would increase the motherboard's ram limit. Tread there with extreme caution though. Do a lot of reading on bios flashing to be sure it's something you want to do. The consequences of a bad flash can be catastrophic. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.

Looks like 256mb is the max capacity of that machine: http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.asp?Mfr%2BProductline=HP%2BPavilion+6600+Series&mfr=HP&cat=RAM&model=Pavilion+6630&submit=Go If you want improved gaming performance, you may wanna "downgrade" to Windows 98SE, & upgrade the video card...

I also think chnging to Win98SE is the best solution. Win98SE is a better gaming system and 256mb for it would be plenty.