Compaq Memory Upgrade Madness

Greetings. I attempting to help someone add memory to a genuine, antique
Compaq 9240 Presario unit. Don't ask why he hasn't bought a new system --
it's too sad a tale to relate. In any case, the unit came with the standard
16M memory (8M on motherboard + two 4M fast page SIMMS populating two of the
available slots.

He has obtained several different batches of memory from a number of
suppliers, the most recent being Crucial. All of the specs for the memory
(four 32M fast page, 60ns, tin leads, non-parity) have been met, and I've
looked through all of the postings I could find relating to such upgrades.

Bottom line: nothing but trouble. The same sorts of problems I've seen
other people report are occurring in this case. The system sees all
the memory and counts properly to ~139M. The system then asks for
verification of the changed memory size, and when accepted it reboots
and goes through the count again. Then it reaches a "Starting Windows"
screen. It is shortly after this point that the system will simply
go black and reboot again, back to the memory count. On subsequent
runs it will reach the screen asking if you want to enter Safe Mode,
but regardless of the choice made at that point a few seconds later
it will reboot again.

Various combinations of SIMMs have been tried (two instead of four,
in the proper pair of slots of course), yielding a VxD error associated
with memory problems, and other combinations similarly result in
grief.

At this stage the whole thing is turning into something of a challenge.
There don't seem to be any BIOS settings related to this that I can
find, and no BIOS upgrades appear to have been made available that would
be related -- the unit is specifically spec'd to accept four 32M SIMMs
as an upgrade. I thought perhaps there was some issue with the unit's
video memory map conflicting with the new memory, but I haven't been
able to find anything to confirm this.

Any suggestions on ways to approach this upgrade -- including alterations
to Windows (Win95 "A") configurations or BIOS issues I might
have missed would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks much in advance.

--Lauren--

Hi.

This May be some Help:

http://mobokive.dyndns.org/Archive/A...uickspecs.html

You may have to tell your friend to reinstall the OS
He can Upgrade to Win98.

I haope this helps

sorry about your dilemma. i tried to help a friend upgrade her hp memory. it
was supposed to be simple upgrade and turned into pure hell. i have added
memory to both my compaqs and never had a problem. i snapped the 128 board in
its proper slot. turned the computer back on. it booted to the desktop but
then began to reboot itself several times. that last time it never made it
back to the desktop. whenever i tried to turn it on the screen would go black
and it would shut off again. i had to end up reinstalling xp. good luck.