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Memory recognition problems with Aspire T180
I've given up on Acer support (and I thought Asus and Abit were bad) after a
month of wasted with meaningless and very occasional responses from them and in the hope that someone in this NG here can help. A month ago I tried to upgrade the memory on a friend's Acer Aspire T180 Desktop from the installed 512Mb to 2.0Gb (running Vista Home Basic and running like a snail) and the system is only recognising and reporting 1Gb when two matching 1Gb memory modules are installed. Both are working individually in what I presume is Slot 0 (my friend could not find her manual and I could find no motherboard reference documents or manual on the Acer Web Site) Neither of the memory sticks will work individually in the other Slot (Slot 1 ?) and the system will not boot. However the system will recognise either of the 1Gb modules in Slot 0 and the original 512 Mb in Slot 1 (reporting a total of 1.5 Gb). The memory is OCZ PC2 4200 1024Mb DDR2 (Part No: OCZ25331024V). Both memory modules have been checked as working on my own system. I cannot find any relevant info on the Acer site about this computer, or the motherboard fitted, so has anyone out there met up with similar problems with memory not being compatible with this motherboard/computer or a memory limitation not being well publicised Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks Geoff |
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Memory recognition problems with Aspire T180
Some being by the name of Geoff managed to piece together the following:
Neither of the memory sticks will work individually in the other Slot (Slot 1 ?) and the system will not boot. However the system will recognise either of the 1Gb modules in Slot 0 and the original 512 Mb in Slot 1 (reporting a total of 1.5 Gb). The memory is OCZ PC2 4200 1024Mb DDR2 (Part No: OCZ25331024V). Both memory modules have been checked as working on my own system. Doesn't the T180 have 4 memory slots? I had a look on the Crucial site and it says it'll take 4 x 1gb - http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/list...=Aspire%20T180 -- The trouble with women is that they never put the toilet seat back up! |
#3
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Memory recognition problems with Aspire T180
"TGGA" wrote in message . uk... Some being by the name of Geoff managed to piece together the following: Neither of the memory sticks will work individually in the other Slot (Slot 1 ?) and the system will not boot. However the system will recognise either of the 1Gb modules in Slot 0 and the original 512 Mb in Slot 1 (reporting a total of 1.5 Gb). The memory is OCZ PC2 4200 1024Mb DDR2 (Part No: OCZ25331024V). Both memory modules have been checked as working on my own system. Doesn't the T180 have 4 memory slots? I had a look on the Crucial site and it says it'll take 4 x 1gb - http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/list...=Aspire%20T180 -- The trouble with women is that they never put the toilet seat back up! Agreed, I eventually managed to find and download the specs and manual (user guide) from the Acer US site and the specs say 4Gb as well, but nothing as to how that 4Gb is made up (ie 2 x 2Gb or 4 x 1Gb). There are four slots, but looks to me as if two are DDR2 and the other two DDR (two distinct colours). The manual is useless apart from telling you how to turn the computer on, and the specs say nothing about DDR memory only DDR2; so will have to check that out just in case they are both DDR2 and I should be using one of the other memory slots. Acer UK will not, or cannot, give me a straight answer as to what memory is compatible with this board so I will have to try and identify the motherboard and work from that. Thanks Geoff |
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Memory recognition problems with Aspire T180
On Sep 12, 7:56 am, "Geoff" wrote:
"TGGA" wrote in message . uk... Some being by the name of Geoff managed to piece together the following: Neither of thememorysticks will work individually in the other Slot (Slot 1 ?) and the system will not boot. However the system will recognise either of the 1Gb modules in Slot 0 and the original 512 Mb in Slot 1 (reporting a total of 1.5 Gb). Thememoryis OCZ PC2 4200 1024Mb DDR2 (Part No: OCZ25331024V). Bothmemorymodules have been checked as working on my own system. Doesn't theT180have 4memoryslots? I had a look on the Crucial site and it says it'll take 4 x 1gb - http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/list...=Aspire%20T180 -- The trouble with women is that they never put the toilet seat back up! Agreed, I eventually managed to find and download the specs and manual (user guide) from theAcerUS site and the specs say 4Gb as well, but nothing as to how that 4Gb is made up (ie 2 x 2Gb or 4 x 1Gb). There are four slots, but looks to me as if two are DDR2 and the other two DDR (two distinct colours). The manual is useless apart from telling you how to turn the computer on, and the specs say nothing about DDRmemoryonly DDR2; so will have to check that out just in case they are both DDR2 and I should be using one of the othermemoryslots. AcerUK will not, or cannot, give me a straight answer as to whatmemoryis compatible with this board so I will have to try and identify the motherboard and work from that. Thanks Geoff I have a similar problem. My PC does recognizes the two 512 DDR2 667 but it only goes as fast as DDR2 400. Tryed to contact Acer support and their final response was to ship the PC back to them. Hope sombody can help with a BIOS patch or something. Thanks, Giovanni |
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Memory recognition problems with Aspire T180
wrote in message ups.com... On Sep 12, 7:56 am, "Geoff" wrote: "TGGA" wrote in message . uk... Some being by the name of Geoff managed to piece together the following: Neither of thememorysticks will work individually in the other Slot (Slot 1 ?) and the system will not boot. However the system will recognise either of the 1Gb modules in Slot 0 and the original 512 Mb in Slot 1 (reporting a total of 1.5 Gb). Thememoryis OCZ PC2 4200 1024Mb DDR2 (Part No: OCZ25331024V). Bothmemorymodules have been checked as working on my own system. Doesn't theT180have 4memoryslots? I had a look on the Crucial site and it says it'll take 4 x 1gb - http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/list...=Aspire%20T180 -- The trouble with women is that they never put the toilet seat back up! Agreed, I eventually managed to find and download the specs and manual (user guide) from theAcerUS site and the specs say 4Gb as well, but nothing as to how that 4Gb is made up (ie 2 x 2Gb or 4 x 1Gb). There are four slots, but looks to me as if two are DDR2 and the other two DDR (two distinct colours). The manual is useless apart from telling you how to turn the computer on, and the specs say nothing about DDRmemoryonly DDR2; so will have to check that out just in case they are both DDR2 and I should be using one of the othermemoryslots. AcerUK will not, or cannot, give me a straight answer as to whatmemoryis compatible with this board so I will have to try and identify the motherboard and work from that. Thanks Geoff I have a similar problem. My PC does recognizes the two 512 DDR2 667 but it only goes as fast as DDR2 400. Tryed to contact Acer support and their final response was to ship the PC back to them. Hope sombody can help with a BIOS patch or something. Thanks, Giovanni Managed to resolve the problem myself today, but my experience over the past month goes to prove how the lack of good documentation together with a lack of good knowledgeable support staff (as well as a certain amount of admitted self-complacency on my part) can make a mountain out of a mole hill. I'm still not sure whether the solution I found is peculiar to this specific computer (i.e. it does have a motherboard problem), or a problem in the general design of the motherboard used in the T180 computers, but if it is of help to anyone out there it worked for me. As TGGA stated the motherboard does in fact have four memory slots, two pairs but with different colour surrounds. From my experience this set up has only been used where the motherboard supports different types of RAM (SDRAM/DDR & more recently DDR/DDR2). In the absence of any documentation to the contrary, I had, wrongly, presumed this to be the case with this motherboard and had ignored the two colour-matching memory slots that had not been used. In fact all four slots are DDR2 (so why the different colours?), but the computer would only recognise the new memory if it was installed in what was the vacant (matching colour) slots. Simply replacing the factory installed memory did not work and the computer would not boot. The computer is now running very nicely with 2.5Gb (the original factory installed memory in its default slot and the 2 x 1Gb sticks in the colour-matched pair of slots) being fully recognised by the BIOS and Vista. Hope this info is of some help to someone out there. Geoff |
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Memory recognition problems with Aspire T180
Geoff - I've read in lots of places that you can 'fudge' extra memory in a T180 into working by using odd layouts of modules in the various slots. In my experience, this is just something of a miracle and masks the real cause of the problem. Put simply, the T180's motherboard/Bios doesn't behave the way you would expect when you put extra memory into it. -What every sensible motherboard in the world does-: Notices that the memory configuration has changed (usually signified by a 'CMOS Mismatch' error) and takes you into the BIOS screens to 'save and exit' the new configuration. It then works perfectly with the newly registered memory. -What the T180 does-: Nothing. It just tries to struggle on with the memory configuration it already has stored, which means that the machine either locks up, behaves badly, or 'sort of' recognises some or all of the new memory if you insert it in odd combinations. To force the machine to acquire the new memory configuration properly with the modules in the locations that you actually think they should be in, all you have to do is clear the CMOS by powering the machine right off and removing the CMOS battery for five minutes. (Then put it back in). When you power the machine back up you won't necessarily see any message to the effect that the memory configuration has changed, but dumping the CMOS forces the motherboard to re-scan and re-store all the machine details including whatever memory configuration it now finds fitted. Once back into windows you should see that the new memory is all on-stream and working properly. (You will also have to reset the time/date). Since the motherboard does NOT automatically notice when the memory layout has changed, you will probably find that you have to clear the CMOS every time you change the memory layout or size (which hopefully won't be too often, once you have it the way you want it). If clearing the CMOS still doesn't resolve your problem then try looking up a BIOS upgrade from Acer's website - the latest one I've found is version R1-C0 but I didn't need to use that to fix very similar problems to the ones you are describing. If you do try to flash the bios be warned that you MUST go into the bios screens and change the 'CMOS BOOTBLOCK PROTECTION' setting from ENABLED to DISABLED. If you try to flash it with this setting ENABLED the new bios won't be loaded and worse still, the original one will be damaged. As to the two pairs of coloured sockets - if you put an identical pair of modules in same-coloured sockets they will function in dual-channel mode which I gather is faster. You could, for example, have 2 * 512MB in the purple slots and 2 * 1GB in the orange slots. If you mix and match modules randomly across the array of sockets they will still work, but each module will only function in single channel mode. |
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