- Joined
- 30 Mar 2008
- Messages
- 2,477
- Age
- 39
Ok, so I build aircraft for a living and starships as a hobby, and yet I've never upgraded a PC . Mostly because I tend to run laptops and the main problem with my last one was that the screen started to die.
Anyways, my current mesh machine is an old Packard Bell running XP on a Pentium 4 with 512mb RAM. As you may have picked up from my thread, I've had a few issues with it of late and figured it was the RAM dying on me. I managed to acquire a few sticks of 1Gb RAM and today finally found the time to crack open the case...
First thing I noticed, my PC was full of cobwebs. So I cleaned that out. Next thing, despite all I've been told in the past, there was only one stick of RAM in the box (I had assumed it'd be a pair of 256mb as the PC has been erroneously reporting it only has 256MB RAM). However there were two slots, so I pulled out the stick and replaced it with my new one - or rather tried to, it didn't fit.
On further investigation, it seems that my PC runs DDR RAM (yes, that's DDR1) whereas the sticks I have are DDR2 - d'oh. So I reseated the original and fired it up and yes, thankfully, it still works (and reports 512MB for now).
Anyway, this means I'll need to shop around a bit for some old DDR1 RAM. Looking on Amazon there are a few out there, but I'm not all that familiar with RAM specs. This is what was in the box:
Samsung Korea 0343C
PC 2700U-25331-B2
M368L6423DTM-CB3
512MB DDR PC2700 CL2.5
Now looking around this means that its 512MB (obviously), 184 pin, 333MHz, CL2.5.
I'm not really sure what the CL2.5 means, but looking on the interweb all the DDR I can find is CL3. So I guess my question in this long winded post is what is the significance of CL2.5 vs CL3 and would it make a difference if I replaced the original stick with a pair of 1GB DDR 333MHz but at CL3?
Any other comments would be welcome as I'm one of these people who have never really investigated the mysteries of the PC (I actually thought these computer things would never catch on, at age 10 my school had access to three Acorns and a single Windows 95 PC that we weren't allowed to touch).
Anyways, my current mesh machine is an old Packard Bell running XP on a Pentium 4 with 512mb RAM. As you may have picked up from my thread, I've had a few issues with it of late and figured it was the RAM dying on me. I managed to acquire a few sticks of 1Gb RAM and today finally found the time to crack open the case...
First thing I noticed, my PC was full of cobwebs. So I cleaned that out. Next thing, despite all I've been told in the past, there was only one stick of RAM in the box (I had assumed it'd be a pair of 256mb as the PC has been erroneously reporting it only has 256MB RAM). However there were two slots, so I pulled out the stick and replaced it with my new one - or rather tried to, it didn't fit.
On further investigation, it seems that my PC runs DDR RAM (yes, that's DDR1) whereas the sticks I have are DDR2 - d'oh. So I reseated the original and fired it up and yes, thankfully, it still works (and reports 512MB for now).
Anyway, this means I'll need to shop around a bit for some old DDR1 RAM. Looking on Amazon there are a few out there, but I'm not all that familiar with RAM specs. This is what was in the box:
Samsung Korea 0343C
PC 2700U-25331-B2
M368L6423DTM-CB3
512MB DDR PC2700 CL2.5
Now looking around this means that its 512MB (obviously), 184 pin, 333MHz, CL2.5.
I'm not really sure what the CL2.5 means, but looking on the interweb all the DDR I can find is CL3. So I guess my question in this long winded post is what is the significance of CL2.5 vs CL3 and would it make a difference if I replaced the original stick with a pair of 1GB DDR 333MHz but at CL3?
Any other comments would be welcome as I'm one of these people who have never really investigated the mysteries of the PC (I actually thought these computer things would never catch on, at age 10 my school had access to three Acorns and a single Windows 95 PC that we weren't allowed to touch).