Acer T180 and memory

[Rich]

Hi

Brought myself a Acer T180 yesterday, AMD 3800 dual core, 1 Gig
memory, 160 Gg harddrive, and Gforce 6100 onboard.

All working fine but I want to upgrade the memory to 2 Gig.

I have 4 x DDR400 512meg from another system but will it work in this
system? Theres currently 2 x DDR2 512 inside. I can't find a
motherboard manual anywhere.

The acer site contains the drivers (which dont actually work mind you
- network) but there is nothing on a manual.

Worried about just plugging it in and blowing the board.

Is DDR2 backwards compatiable to DDR400?

I assume it would be better to have 2 Gig of slower memory than 1 Gig
(shared with graphics 256meg). I know memory is quite cheap but no
point in buying more if I dont need to.

Thanks.

Rich

 

[Paul]

Hi

Brought myself a Acer T180 yesterday, AMD 3800 dual core, 1 Gig
memory, 160 Gg harddrive, and Gforce 6100 onboard.

All working fine but I want to upgrade the memory to 2 Gig.

I have 4 x DDR400 512meg from another system but will it work in this
system? Theres currently 2 x DDR2 512 inside. I can't find a
motherboard manual anywhere.

The acer site contains the drivers (which dont actually work mind you
- network) but there is nothing on a manual.

Worried about just plugging it in and blowing the board.

Is DDR2 backwards compatiable to DDR400?

I assume it would be better to have 2 Gig of slower memory than 1 Gig
(shared with graphics 256meg). I know memory is quite cheap but no
point in buying more if I dont need to.

Thanks.

Rich

A T180 uses DDR2 memory. You *cannot* mix DDR and DDR2. They use
different voltages. The pinout is different.

http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Aspire+T180

The BIOS may have a setting to reduce the amount of memory
shared. You could drop it to 64Meg for example.

I would say, for the time being, you could test your new machine
with the included 1GB of DDR2 memory. You can check, using the
Task Manager, how filled up the memory is, while you are working.
(Control-Alt-Delete to get Task Manager, at least on my machine with
Win2K.) I use 1GB on a couple machines here, and when gaming, fill
it to the 600-700MB level. The only time I hit swap in recent memory,
was trying to print the world's largest web page.

If you want to experience a very large web page, click here
This takes many minutes to load on my machine. And if you
dare to print it, you'll experience swapping. I was trying to
print to Acrobat Distiller.

http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/bttv/

Paul

 

[DaveW]

DDR2 is NOT compatible with DDR. They are completely different.