I have recently bought, on the advice of the retailers, MICRON ORIGINAL 256MB pc133 CAS3 SDRAM, as i wished to upgrade the RAM on my computer. I currently have 256mb of memory and wished to put another 256mb in the adjacent slot. however, it won't work... on its own it won't boot the machine at all, and as an extra 256 in slot 2 (alongside the original piece in slot 1) it is recognised by the computer but is very unstable (win98 crashes, other programs report errors etc). so my question would be.... 1. is this simply the wrong type of memory or 2. is the new memory stick defective 3. is there something either wrong with my machine or something that needs adjusting to allow correct functioning? as the new stick won't boot the machine at all i would guess at 1. or 2. !!! The old memory stick says "HYNIX 239A HY57V56820BT-H" on the chips themselves (of which there are 8 on one side of the stick). Also, on the white label with the bar code it says "32x64 pc133 s7g4c8nHYN133" does anyone have any suggestions as to the root of the problem?! many thanks in advance dave

I suggest you try booting the machine 4 times using 256mb each time. First try the old stick in slot1, next boot with the old stick in slot 2, next with the new stick in slot 1, next with the new stick in slot 2. that will help determine who the culprit is. Make sure your mobo allows 2 256mb sticks. If its old it may have a 256mb total memory limit.

thanks for that... i did as u suggested and the old memory boots up the machine fine in both slots.. the new one in neither. Therefore the problem is the new stick. Which, as ever(!), leads 2 further questions; 1. is it possbile the new stick is not malfunctioning at all but simply the wrong type of memory? am i right in thinking the type of memory required for this machine is pc133 sdram CL2/CL3? 2. the motherboard it was bought relatively recently (12 months ago), but the machine is custom built, so i guess i can't be completely sure that an old motherboard wasn't thrown in! how would i confirm or otherwise that motherboard can support further memory addtions? thanks again and apologies for my lack of technical undestanding! dave

motherboards that support pc133 memory tend to be low-priced and lower quality, or just old. 133mhz is somewhat of a stretch for them, resulting in timing problems with some memory sticks. Chances are the stick is fine, its just not good enough to work on your mobo. I'd say either return the stick for another or go into bios and lower your dram speed to 100mhz. Its unlikely you would notice a fall-off in system performance by running at the lower memory speed. Or you could try setting the memory cas to 3 in bios. That may solve the problem too and will give up less performance than going from 133 down to 100. You may need to download your mobo manual to figure out how to make these changes in bios.

check crucial.com for memory recommendations. you need to know the model of mobo. if a store told you the memory should work & it doesn't, take it back.

i got some info thru crucial, and they also indicated that it was pc133 SDRAM that i should b using (either CL2 or 3). so i'm not realy sure why this stick isn't working unless, it really is defective. if there is simply a problem with the machine recognising the extra memory, the new stick should (i would have thought) at least b able to operate on its own in the first slot.