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Recommended Book
Upgrading and Repairing Laptops (Upgrading and Repairing)
By Scott Mueller
Que
Price: $14.94

Home » Memory
How to Upgrade your Notebook Memory
Author: Gabriel Torres
Type: Tutorials Last Updated: September 4, 2005
Page: 4 of 6
$ Check REAL-TIME pricing for Kingston SODIMM 512 MB PC2700 DDR RAM (ktt3311/512) $
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Dell: $39.99 Egoodz: $62.70

Checking Your Current Modules

Even though you have already run Everest software, it is always good to visually check the type of SO-DIMM modules your notebook has and their speeds, since you need to buy a SO-DIMM memory module with the same technology and speed. In our case, our notebook had two DDR PC2700 256 MB modules from Samsung. So we bought a 1 GB PC2700 (“DDR333”) module.

How to Upgrade Your Notebook Memory
click to enlarge
Figure 7: Checking the memory modules installed in our notebook.

Below is a cross-reference table that may be useful.

Module Type Chip Type  Technology  Clock
PC66 PC66 SDRAM 66 MHz
PC100 PC100 SDRAM 100 MHz
PC133 PC133 SDRAM 133 MHz
PC1600 DDR200 DDR-SDRAM 200 MHz
PC2100 DDR266 DDR-SDRAM 266 MHz
PC2700 DDR333 DDR-SDRAM 333 MHz
PC3200 DDR400 DDR-SDRAM 400 MHz

One interesting thing is that you can install modules with a higher speed grade than the one currently installed in your notebook. But if you have to “mix” modules, the ideal is to have them all with the same speed grade. We could buy a DDR400 (PC3200) module for our notebook, but since we were willing to use one of the 256 MB original modules, which were DDR333 (PC2700), we bought a DDR333 (PC2700) module. We could buy and install a DDR400 (PC3200) module; it would have worked just fine.

When mixing modules with different speed grades, the system will access the modules at the slower speed available. For example, if we mixed our DDR333 module with a DDR400 part, the system would access the DDR400 part at 333 MHz even though this module could run faster, because of the other module installed on the system (this is a generic explanation, some systems can overcome this limitation).

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