Ram question??

[mikeymike]

i have quite alot of old 98 machines and am wondering if i take out the ram and put it into the spare slot on our current xp machines to quicken them up a bit as we have pretty low spec xp machines here will this work??

[sparkeh]

Depends. All you need to know is if the type of RAM from your old machines is compatible with the motherboard of your new machines.

 

Probably easy to find out what your new machines accept, but finding what type of RAM you are pulling out from the old isnt always so easy.

 

But I wouldn't advise sticking it in 'just to test'

 

Thinking about it, the chances are that they are aren't compatible.

Edited June 12, 2008 by sparkeh

[SYNACK]

I depends on what kind of RAM the machines take, your windows 98 machines are most likely to take SD ram unless they were brought very late, the XP machines are most likely to run DDR RAM.

 

These two types of RAM are incompatible and so non-transferable. Chances are that the 98 machines only have tiny amounts of RAM like 32MB chips that will make very little difference to your newer XP machines even if it is compatible.

[SYNACK]

This site should be enlightening:

Types of RAM: How to Identify and their Specifications - Technibble - A Resource for Computer Repair Technicians & to get PC tech support help.

 

http://www.computermemoryupgrade.net/types-of-computer-memory-common-uses.html

[mikeymike]

I depends on what kind of RAM the machines take, your windows 98 machines are most likely to take SD ram unless they were brought very late, the XP machines are most likely to run DDR RAM.

 

These two types of RAM are incompatible and so non-transferable. Chances are that the 98 machines only have tiny amounts of RAM like 32MB chips that will make very little difference to your newer XP machines even if it is compatible.

 

ive literally just thought sod it and try it so took one out stuck it in and bingo it shows up so now its gone from 256 to 480 mb ram. not great but got to be better than what it was

[SYNACK]

ive literally just thought sod it and try it so took one out stuck it in and bingo it shows up so now its gone from 256 to 480 mb ram. not great but got to be better than what it was

 

Nice, they must have been late model 98 machines. Glad it worked out for you.

[Michael]

XP does run much better with more than 256MB of memory, so it is a good move.

 

There are quite a few different types of memory now - EDO, SDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3 and Rambus are the main ones. The most common these days are DDR2, slowly moving onto DDR3. And of course there are the notebook variants too.

 

As already mentioned, Windows 98 desktop systems would mostly of used SDRAM or DDR

[BootManager]

even if your new PCs cannot take the old PCs RAM you might find that some of your printers will take it, and thats well worth doing.

[srochford]

ive literally just thought sod it and try it so took one out stuck it in

 

That's the spirit :-)

 

If you don't try, you don't learn (OK; it might have gone "bang" but it's actually pretty unlikely!)

 

You may actually see a huge increase in performance. As part of our machine startup script we time from the bit in event log where it says "machine started" to the script finishing. We've now got about 250,000 such bits of data; for machines with 256 and 512 Mb RAM, the results are below - it's almost twice as fast to start a (very similar) machine with 512Mb as 256Mb. This faster startup is also reflected in logon and makes people feel that their machine is quicker.

 

RAM Number time

256 89712 154.3

512 41956 89.5

[mikeymike]

ye quicker log on will def keep users happy as that is the main problem here with our machines. cheers for all the advice guys