Hello,

I’m looking for upgrading with a 512MB module. Anyone experienced a cheap and high quality module ?

Thx

Pieter

from someone who can take MC and ship to nepal, and actually get it here. thx,

If you’re referring to non-Sony branded memory then Buffalo makes compatible memory that’s slightly cheaper. I know it’s available in Japan for roughly 75-80% of Sony’s price.

I know that http://www.icube.us sells the part for people living in the US. Hopefully that helps you.

Jig,

We accept MC now and will be able to ship one from Japan to you at Nepal.  Call Yuni at 626.215.9864 if you want to get one.

We have both Sony brand and the Greenhouse brand.

hey folks, these guys/gals are the best. I give them *****stars out of 5 for service and pricing. waiting for my chip to arrive in nepal now. but what to do with all that ram? suggestions?

I too give iCube high ratings for excellent communication and being a good company to deal with. I got my memory upgrade from them and the whole process commenced smoothly without any hassles and a very fast shipment.  :D

Thanx Jig and Groovy for the compliment

Does anyone have the exact specs on the memory module?  I’m guessing it is a PC2100 DDR SODIMM, but is it CL2.5?  How many pins?

It is a 172 pin DDR Micro DIMM memory.  Not too many manufacturers have the 512M version of it.  Mostly only have the 256M version.

The official 512MB Sony memory module has the following specs:[list]Model number: PCGA-MM512U
512MB capacity
PC2100 DDR
172-pin microDIMM
CAS 2.5 (up to 133Mhz) or CAS 2 (up to 100Mhz)
16x(32Mx8) configuration
[/list:u]My chip was using Infineon memory but this may vary.

groovyone, what were the results of your adding memory? Did you notice an increase in speed? Less hard drive thrashing?

Also, what was your original memory size and the after-upgrade size?

Hello,

Kingston just released the new 512MB for $195 !

http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configurator/modelsinfo.asp?SysID=+15755+&distributor=0&submit1=Search

I always had good experience with kingston, so I’m going to order one. I’ll give you feed-back.

Pieter

[quote author=“pmurph5”]groovyone, what were the results of your adding memory? Did you notice an increase in speed? Less hard drive thrashing?

Also, what was your original memory size and the after-upgrade size?

I went from 512MB to 1GB.

Generally speaking you won’t see an increase in speed simply by adding memory. It really depends on what I’m doing. When I’m working on multiple applications (coding app, photoshop, ftp app, 2 different browsers, and e-mail then swapping between the apps is fast and instantaneous since the computer can keep most of it in memory and there’s almost no disk swapping going on (almost none because Windows swaps no matter what even if you have plenty of memory).

My web browsing is faster especially since I’ve dedicated part of my memory to a ramdisk and have my browser caches pointed at the ramdisk. The reason why is that when you load most web pages it copies all of the little files (.gifs .jpegs .html .css .js) to your hard disk causing fragmentation and lots of disk access. Using a ramdisk, the files are basically copied to memory (which is 10-20x faster) and there’s less thrashing on the hard disk. Revisiting sites is even faster since it pulls the files out of memory and it’s not uncommon to revisit a site and not see any disk access at all.

I did ram disks back in the days of the Amiga, but I’ve never done it in Windows. How do you set up a ramdisk? What software? Does it appear as a drive to the system?

And is there any problem with cookies if your browser cache is in ram? Do the cookies go one place (HD) and the page elements (HTML, jpg, gif) to another (ramdisk)?

[quote author=“pmurph5”]I did ram disks back in the days of the Amiga, but I’ve never done it in Windows. How do you set up a ramdisk? What software? Does it appear as a drive to the system?

And is there any problem with cookies if your browser cache is in ram? Do the cookies go one place (HD) and the page elements (HTML, jpg, gif) to another (ramdisk)?

There are 4 known RAMDISK programs for Windows XP.

The first is Microsoft’s generic driver which can only hold up to 32MB and is not included with the OS. You can find it on the Knowledge base. It’s generally not very useful.

The second is AR-Soft’s RAMDisk program (which is free) and can supposedly create very large hard disks and is very easy to use and setup.

The third is SuperSpeed’s RamDisk XP which is a commercial product. This program works well too and allows you to save/load the drive so you can backup the contents of your ramdrive. The only problem is that it’s a manual process which is lame even though they claim it does it automatically.

The fourth is Cenatek’s RamDiskXP which is also a commercial product. This is the one I use and have had pretty good success with it. Cenatek works like SuperSpeed’s product except they offer TRUE automatic saving/loading of ramdrive contents. You can backup periodically or simply on shutdown. It offers the most customization as well. You can configure if it behaves like a true ramdrive or as a local disk.

NOTE: There is an issue with the 855 chipset and these ramdrive softwares. Many of them won’t let you create a drive larger than around 100MB due to the dynamic nature of the memory. Cenatek is working on the issue and should have the solution out pretty soon. I’m not sure about the others.

In terms of cookies and the like, you can actually configure where the cookies go. It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do but if you use a program like X-Teq Systems X-Setup, there’s an option under Internet -> Internet Explorer -> System -> Directories where you can finely tune where you want everything to go.

So, in my case, I have 100MB dedicated (for now) to the Internet cache and cookies are saved to the actual hard disk. When Cenatek posts the update to the RamDiskXP software then I’ll allocated 384 or so to the cache and also point the TEMP/TMP directories to the ramdrive which speeds up a lot of operations in Windows. One cool benefit of this (if you choose not to save the contents) is that every time you reboot, all of the temp and cache files are purged from your system automatically making it slightly more secure and less cluttered.

I just received my 512MB RAM chip today, and was wondering how to install it. I couldn’t find any instructions online or in the documentation that came with the computer. Is it just in that little vented door on the bottom of the computer? Any help would be much appreciated, I don’t want to mess up this 2-day old machine!