First post, by KingDaveRa
- Rank
- Newbie
I've got a Compaq Presario 1260 laptop I recently picked up. It's a rather nice little unit, if quirky. It's an AMD K6/2 333, got a nice screen, pretty decent inbuilt audio, but it also has 32 MB of PC66 RAM soldered to the motherboard. Unfortunately, the onboard RAM is testing bad around the 30MB mark. I've checked over all sorts of things, and so far I've not found anything obviously wrong.
So I'm wondering what I can do about this hard-wired RAM. I'm planning to run Windows 98SE. I found it wouldn't complete setup until I loaded himem.sys - suddenly it boots and runs, but will occasionally blue screen. It's pot luck if you hit that bad RAM! I had a dig around to see if there was a way to map out bad RAM, but I've not found anything.
Another possible - but high risk - option is to get out the soldering kit and remove/replace the SDRAM modules. I'm assuming that's not going to be simple as all the components constituting the onboard 'dimm' would have to be removed, and/or traces cut. I'm not averse to doing this because it does have a slot for RAM, and I have a 128MB PC66 DIMM, which does check out fine in memory tests.
Failing that, is there something I've missed, like BIOS issues (It's on the latest) or some other silly thing? Or do I just keep an eye open for another 1260 with a smashed screen or something?
