old gateway and problem with adding more ram

[trenchfoot]

i went to gateway support and plugged in the serial # for a friend's gateway geezer 700 essential.
i found out with that model, 384 mb's of ram is all she could handle on win98se.
the gateway site recommended simpletech or kingston ram, so i got a 256mb stick of non-ecc unbuffered pc133 simpletech ram to add to the 128mb stick already in place.
with 128mb stick in slot 1 and 256 in slot 2, the old gal would'nt even post.
so i shut'er down, pulled the plug again and swapped slots, still no post.
so i ran just the 256 stick in slot 1 and same prob.
now for the wierd part: making sure i had a good seat on the re-install, i ran the original ram in slot 1 as a confirm on the slot not being the problem, and no post again.
shut'er down again, pulled the plug again, re-seated the original stick in the original slot and i finally got it to post.
so i shut'er down again and pulled the plug again and re-installed the 256mb stick in slot 2 fired it up and got into the bios.
bios setup saw the ram as one 128mb stick and 1 256mb stick, but system memory reports as seeing only 128mb.
on boot and one beep, the first boot screen read: ERROR 0232: extended ram failed at offset: 1B.
when i continued the boot two beeps was heard and the message: "invalid vxd dynamic link call to device number 3, service B. your windows configuration is invalid. run the windows setup program to correct this problem" showed up.
after removing the 256mb stick from slot 2 and booted, it acted normally.
could it be that because the original stick is two-sided and the new 256mb stick is one-sided that i'm seeing this isuue? or?........

 

[trenchfoot]

a bump out of desperation.......

 

[jspeicher]

why do you type like this?

 

[Viper96720]

www.crucial.com where I would've gone to get the ram.
You need low density ram can only use 128MB sticks. Max 384MB 128MB filling all 3 slots.

 

[Ken90630]

Not to insult your intelligence, but are you sure that old Gateway'osaurus uses PC 133 RAM? I'm typing away on one right now myself, and it requires PC 66 RAM only. It's a Celeron 333 box from 1998, and I ran Win98SE on it originally (Win 2KPro now though).

I added a stick of RAM myself awhile back. It originally came with only 64MB! D'oh! Had a heck of a time even finding PC66 RAM anymore. I think I bought a stick of Kingston at Fry's, if memory serves. They had to special order it. :roll:

Just thought I'd mention this in case you hadn't thought of it.

 

[trenchfoot]

viper, i got your info confirmed and will follow through on it. thanks!

ken, gateway support lists installed ram in this box as pc100, but from experiences i had long ago, i didn't think it would make any difference if i used pc133. but, thanks to you pointing it out, i did reconfirmed with confidence the ram specs for this box.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

it uses an old low density ram chipset. meaning, its PC100, and is meant for first generation LOW density ram modules which are hard to find. any stick of 128meg PC133 should be considered low density and should work just underclocked to PC100 speeds. i believe its the Intel 810 chipset?

anyhow, yes, PC133 should work fine at PC66 and 100 speeds,its a matter of making sure the DIMMS are low density.