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Can I put 256MB PC133 in a notebook with 192MB PC66 max?

K

Kuroyama

Member
I have an older Compaq Presario 1920 notebook ("upgraded" to 333MHz PII mobile & 40GB 5200RPM hard drive). It runs Win98, WinXP & Fedora just fine (although a bit slow to boot the latter two) and is fairly compact so I don't feel like replacing it as I normally use my desktop anyways.

I would like to add some memory to this. I've reached the official maximum of 192MB PC66 memory (64MB built-in + 128MB extra). It seems the largest PC66 modules available are 128MB, which might explain the 192MB maximum. However, if I pop in PC133 shouldn't it clock back to PC66 automatically? Would the BIOS recognize a larger 256MB or 512MB module, or might it only recognize the first 128MB?
 
Worse scenerio is that it won't read and you'll have RAM for your next Lappy...get the fastest as RAM is backward compatible 😉
 
I had the same situation a while back with my Fujitsu laptop. It runs PC100 with 128MB built in, 256MB total max. I bought a 128MB stick of PC133 and it ran fine.

I came across the opportunity to try out a 256MB stick of PC100 and the laptop only detected 128MB of it, which really sucks since I know that laptop would run even better with 384MB.

Now, I won't say that's how it works for all laptops, but this is just my experience with trying to go past manufacturer's limits.
 
Those old 66 MHz chipsets have a surprisingly low limit on how big a RAM chip they can handle. Hence the 128-MByte per-DIMM limit. This isn't about the speed grade at all.
 
Thanks for the info. Checked and found the chipset is the Intel 440BX series. Supposedly supports up to 1GB RAM, although I suppose this doesn't mean Compaq's BIOS will be OK. I'll give it a shot and if it fails then I'll sell the RAM on EBay.
 
Intel BX does 128 megaBITS per chip. So the largest SO-DIMMs you can have are 128 MBytes, made from exactly those "16Mx8" chips that are the largest the 440BX can handle.
 
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