Pavilion 7840 RAM upgrade woes

[Vito]

A friend of mine recently tried to upgrade his Pavilion 7840 from the stock
64MB of ram right up to the max of 512MB, so he bought 2 generic 256MB sticks (PC133
SDRAM, infineon chips) from CompUSA. However, when he puts either/both of the new sticks
in the machine, it gives the 1-3-3-1 BIOS error beep, which stands for "troubleshoot
the system memory", according to the HP website.

Has anybody here run into a similar problem? It still boots fine with the
original 64MB stick, if I add one of the sticks to the other open slot,
the system (both winME & BIOS) only sees the 64 MB stick. It seems well-nigh
impossible IMHO, to have two sticks be DOA (even generic ones). That seems
to me to imply that the sticks can't run at 100MHz, which also seems really
improbable. At any rate, I'm completely stumped at this point, so I figured
I'd turn it over to the Alpha geeks here... don't let me down, guys!

 

[amdskip]

I have upgraded a number of HP machines with more memory including 256mb sticks. That memory may very well be not dead and it may be low density, etc. and the HP doesn't like that. Try using the www.crucial.com memory selector and buy some ram from them. You could try testing the ram in another pc too and see what happens. Most PC133 will run at PC100 without any problems but this is just most of the time.

 

[Vito]

Thanks for the reply... how would I determine if these sticks are low density, etc? IIRC, there wasn't too much info on the packaging. I'd like to get these sticks working if possible before I tell him he's gotta return them and buy from crucial...

Crucial doesn't pricematch, do they? (The CompUSA sticks were only $25 each after rebate...)

 

[redbeard1]

A couple of things could be going on.

1) Some HP's can't use pc133 ram. They didn't write support in the bios for it. I've seen it posted that some older dell's do this also. You'd have to check to model number on the hp site and see what it supports.

2) A number of the cheap 256 meg ram sticks are "high density". In general, intel based system will not see this type of ram correctly. In most cases it only sees it as half the amount it's supposed to be. We have had a lot of problems with this at work lately. It getting hard to find 256 that isn't high density.

Going to Crucial.com and running their memory chooser is a good idea. Even if you don't get it from them you'll have an idea of what is needed. Generally they are a little higher in price, but you know it will work. They have had free shipping on ram in the past, so that will save some cost if they are still doing it.