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Any of you got a 1GB DDR1 SODIMM for my little Inspiron 500m?

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First post, by fyy

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My poor little Inspiron 500m with a 1.3 Ghz Pentium M normally has 2 x 512's but the first SODIMM slot has gone bad and throws out all kinds of errors whenever something is put in the slot now. Running on a single slot of 512 megs of ram is *OK* for most things and old school games but with 8+ firefox tabs open I start get disk thrashing like crazy. I wanna breath more life into it, considering I just replaced the USB board, the other one had all kinds of broken pins. I wanna keep the old engine going and max out the surviving slot. It runs DDR266 but should be able to manage DDR333/400 just fine as well.

I'm also probably going to get a bluetooth module and maybe upgrade the CPU later, but right now I need more ram for it!

Any of you selling any 1GB ddr1 sodimm chips for cheap?

Reply 1 of 6, by Mau1wurf1977

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No sales / trading allowed on VOGONS!

Have a look on eBay, craigslist or other places.

My website with reviews, demos, drivers, tutorials and more...
My YouTube channel

Reply 3 of 6, by Skyscraper

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Try to clean the slot and the memory with alcohol.

Did you try running a single module in the "bad" slot.
Try with both modules to be sure that it isnt a bad memory module.
A 512 MB DDR SODIMM cost about $2 shipped but a 1gb mobule is probably $10 + shipping if not more.

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 4 of 6, by fyy

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Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

No sales / trading allowed on VOGONS!

Have a look on eBay, craigslist or other places.

That's a shame!

Stojke wrote:

Check on Amibay.com

Perfect. Thanks for the tip

Skyscraper wrote:
Try to clean the slot and the memory with alcohol. […]
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Try to clean the slot and the memory with alcohol.

Did you try running a single module in the "bad" slot.
Try with both modules to be sure that it isnt a bad memory module.
A 512 MB DDR SODIMM cost about $2 shipped but a 1gb mobule is probably $10 + shipping if not more.

Yeah the computer won't even post with a single module in the faulty slot! Or sometimes it will post but then freeze loading windows. What's also interesting is that since it's using integrated video which has shared system memory for video memory as well, graphical corruption sometimes happens on the screen itself before crashing and burning horribly. All of this goes away and memtest passes with flying colors when I use either SODIMM in the other 'good' slot.

Reply 6 of 6, by fyy

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JaNoZ wrote:

Bend slot pins? cracked solder joint? did you fiddle around with the ram before it started doing this?

It's been a while but it used to work fine. I'm actually wondering if it's something more mechanical to the issue, because on the Inspiron 500m the little memory cover on the bottom of the laptop is real thin and flimsy and the memory chips are only a few millimeters or so away so I'm wondering if just putting it on my lap is enough to bend it slightly and hit the sodimm itself. The sodimm slot one on the other side is supported by little cover hinges so it might not bend as easily. Really not sure though! I actually put the other sodimm back in after cleaning the slot again with alcohol and it ran nicely, passed memtest and everything. Then I rebooted it and put it on my lap and after a few minutes it crashed and burned as usual! It's still as rock solid as ever when I don't use that slot!

Really a shame though... 1 GB would be so nice again...

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