And thanks for the offer by the way, but I should be able to sort it.
The seller's now offered a replacement too.

On Dec 3, 12:38*am, poachedeggs wrote:
Cheers. *I did manage to get a Cd burnt of Memtest 86 but I stopped
the test at 1 hr 52 minutes (with no errors and 'one pass') before I
saw your reply, so I'll put it on again tomorrow for longer. *Yes,
there's plenty of 128 mb and 256 mb chips on eBay and it can't all be
duff. *Apart from the CL2-ness, both my chips are identical in spec
and using Ben's description, but I do remember someone else remarking
that Compaqs can be a bit hard to please with memory. *The one already
in there says it's made by IBM on the sticker. *The newer one was
Infineon. *I'll give the original seller a while to redeem himself....

By the way, to clarify, I put the chips back as they were after
testing the Infineon alone, and there are no beeps to put up with like
this - it seems sort of weird that it's stopped doing that even though
the troubling chip is still present.

Thanks.

On Dec 2, 10:00*pm, Ben Myers wrote:



poachedeggs wrote:
I recently bought some eBay RAM from someone with a good rep there,
100%. *I've had the chip in for about 10 days and I thought everything
was fine. *It seems to show up, i.e from when I first put it in and
the BIOS amended itself. *And it shows up as having gone from 256 mb
to 512 when I look at Control Panel System.

Just now I used Ramtester by a Mark Gathering and it says about (a
fluctuating) 320 mb available there. *I wouldn't know if that's normal
- I'm thinking as this runs from Windows, unlike Memtest 86+ which I
couldn't get to work, that that might just mean it can't test what
Windows is using.

So I took the newer Ram stick out and started up the machine. *All was
fine, though with Ramtester between 80 mb and 140 mb was available, it
fluctuated, and *haven't used this sort of program before to know if
that's normal, I imagine so.

Then I tried the eBay-bought chip (first in the other chip's slot and
then in the slot it's normally in, i.e.the first slot was blank), and
got the Compaq beep code for bad RAM (one short, two longer). *Does
this necessarily mean it's bad RAM, or not ideal, or what? *The only
difference of their spec is that the eBay chip is CL2 - I had misread
the other. *I only thought that if you used two different bits CL-wise
that both would run at the lesser... speed?

Is this defintely dud RAM, and if so, why is it showing up as 512 mb
when I first put it in and viewing through Control Panel System and,
more importantly perhaps, why isn't it making the bad RAM beeps when
it's in there with the original?

According to Crucial.com this machine - Deskpro 886 EN Short Form
something or other - should have up to three 128 mb chips in, though I
was happy to go by what I was told here in this forum, that it could
have two 256mb chips or one 512mb chip.

Should I have put another CL3 in instead of CL2? *Or would the CL2
work if I add another CL2 and don't use the original CL3?

Would I run into problems if I replaced all the RAM with three 128mb
chips, and in that case should they be CL2 or mightn't the machine not
manage CL2, if that has anything to do with it? *What would you
recommend?

I hadn't noticed any performance improvement, e.g. online Flashplayer
is a bit glitchy (possibly unconnected apparently), and recording with
a USB microphone, that's why I became curious - maybe the eBay fella's
customers are all people who don't check the RAM. *I will in the
meantime see how he reacts to relacing the RAM - though if the problem
is that I bought CL2 then I'd accept it's my fault.

All thoughts appreciated. *Thanks. *(Try not to say you think both
chips are bad!)

Let me add to William's insightful comments. *The memory in the DeskPro
SFF (and other DeskPro P3 systems of same vintage) needs to be
non-parity unbuffered unregistered SDRAM DIMMs. *Recommended speed is
PC133, although the Intel 810 or 815 chipset may have some tolerance for
PC100, IIRC. *The specs above describe generic desktop SDRAM memory.

If the memory you bought is any one of parity (odd number of chips on
each side of SDRAM stick), buffered or registered, you've got server
memory, incompatible with nearly all desktop systems. *Buffered or
registered memory is identifiable by the presence of smallish chips in
addition to the large memory chips on an SDRAM stick.

And I'll verify that the motherboard chipset supports no more than
512MB... Ben Myers- Hide quoted text -

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