G'day Pete,
> I had a chance to try windows 95 B on my computer whith 4 MB ram, it
> worked, but was writting to the hard drive a LOT.
I'm reporting you to the Prevention Of Cruelty To Computers Society;
running Win95 in 4MB RAM is proof of your evil intentions towards
defenceless old computers... ;-))))
> I had to pull the new 4 meg simes I put in because I was having all kinds
> of problems running windows, especially whith the registry.
> The memory showed up in device maniger and mem in dos knew about the new
> memory, but the new memory caused problems for me.
[etc...]
The "0" and "1" refer to memory _Banks_. A typical 386/486 machine
using 30-pin SIMMS has two Banks, each with 4 SIMM slots. A 386sx has 2
SIMM slots per Bank. If you use a Bank, you have to fill it completely
with identical capacity SIMMS. At the very least, fill Bank 0 or the
computer won't start!
Although you can usually mix SIMMs from different manufacturers, and mix
3-chip with 9-chip SIMMs, in the one Bank; I have sometimes found that
some SIMM mixtures will only work in a particular combination. For
example, the four machines I have for my networking experiments have the
following idiosyncrasies:
- machine 1 is a 386-25 with four 256kB SIMMs in Bank 0 and four 1MB
SIMMs in Bank 1, total 5MB. Swapping each lot of SIMMs to the other
Bank results in a 4MB system (the 256kB "vanish" if in Bank 1). All
SIMMs are from the same manufacturer and same speed.
- machine 2 is a 386-33 with four 1MB SIMMs, two 9-chip from Toshiba and
two 3-chip from Samsung, all the same speed and in Bank 0. The
Samsungs _must_ be in the first two slots for the computer to work at
all.
- machine 3 is a 486-25 with eight 1MB SIMMs from five different
manufacturers, speeds of 60 and 70 nanoseconds. It doesn't matter
where each SIMM is installed; this machine always finds 8MB even when
it's running Linux.
- machine 4 is a 386-40 with a strange SIMM slot layout which I found by
trial and error: Bank 0 is slots 1,3,5,7 and Bank 1 is slots 2,4,6,8.
So this machine has four 1MB SIMMs, each from a different
manufacturer, in slots 1,3,5,7; and four 256kB SIMMs in the other
slots for a total 5MB. If I swap each lot of SIMMs to the other Bank,
*all* the memory "vanishes" and it won't start.
It's no better with 72-pin SIMMs. The 586-100 I'm writing this on has
two 8MB SIMMs, and they _must_ be identical or it won't start at all.
This machine has 4 SIMM slots but only the first needs to be occupied (I
started with one 8MB SIMM).
You can also produce some amazing behaviour if you use SIMMs without
parity in a machine that uses parity, or mixing parity/non-parity SIMMs
in the same Bank. Not to mention EDO, SDRAM, Dual Pipeline...you might
be interested in reading through the reviews at Tom's Hardware
(http://www.tomshardware.com).
I hope my examples illustrate how certain combinations of working SIMMs
and working computers can fail to work when brought together; even when
you and the computer shop know they should. So before you try any
strange rituals involving burnt offerings etc to get the computer going;
you might want to try experimenting with the possible permutations of
SIMMs and slots. Don't forget anti-static precautions of course.
cheers,
Fraser Farrell
http://www.dove.net.au/~fraserf/
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