I have been messing around with my Toshiba laptop for a while and had problems installing 4 gigs of ram into it. My a205-s5847 would not take a 2 gig stick of ram in the main top slot if the lower slot had a stick in it.. for example, My laptop came with two 1 gig slots filling the memory docks. If i upgraded to 3 gigs of ram, I had to have the 2 gig slot in the lower dock. If I wanted 4 gigs, i was SOL. If i wanted 2 gigs only, I could boot with either 2-1gig sticks, or 1-2gig stick in the top slot. Toshiba apparently installed hardware that matched windows vista-32 capabilities. Regardless, the point of this post is for one, to see if anyone has found a fix to this problem, and 2: One person I talked to spoke of resetting your bios, because it was holding the ram timing of my old 1 gig sticks and reseting the bios data would refresh it to the new ram timings.. After days of searching, i finally crossed my fingers and decide to try it.

(this resetting procedure works to remove forgotten passwords in bios, i tested it)

to reset the a205-s8545 laptop bios, you must remove your memory sticks and find a J1 jumper that is zig zagg and gold. it is directly under your memory and ****ed to the left side of the memory docks. I did this with my battery in, and held a screwdriver to short it for 25 seconds human count. human count is, not actual seconds, i just counted to 25 in a slow manner. I tried to replicate this with 15 human count seconds and it did not work. I also tried with-out the battery in, and it did not work. When i refer to the battery, i mean the laptop battery, not the cmos battery. I never tried with the power cable in. just in case I was doing something stupid, at least it would not hurt me. lol

Testing this theory was dumb, and i do not wish people to replicate shorting out random shiny objects in any piece of electronics. it can be deadly and/or cost you money. I will post a picture tomorrow of the actual jumper, and of my model number so there are no confusions. I just want a documentation for people with my laptop so they don't have to go through my trial and error. This resets time/date/settings/passwords on toshiba a205-s5847

if anyone has any information on the Toshiba 3gig memory limit, please let me know

tdgeddes at gmail.com

btw... This is site was the most hits i got on this topic, so I want other electronic soldiers in my predicament to get help too =)

read: http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic65114.html

I have been to tallil a few times in the past 6 months doing missions with 4th ID and our ch-47's. We're stationed out of Taji and I am on EML right now about to head back saturday the 6th of dec but that is besides the point.

The ram I installed were 2 sticks of ddr2 pc5300 2-gigs. The ram i took out were 2 sticks of ddr2 pc5300 1-gig. My POST checks the memory up to 1gig and hangs. I have swapped out the ram in my wifes Dell to ensure that the memory was good and it ran fine in all configurations and I checked it about 10 times.
There are of course not even a slight bit of options pertaining to anything important in my BIOS, but with both sticks of new memory in i can enter BIOS setup as I do not let POST complete its test and in BIOS it shows the full 4 gigs.

So I guess since I got this sucker for 450 at the PX, I get what I pay for. lol Its only meant to work for online school purposes anyway, but I do like to play stuff like warhammer 40k dawn of war when I get some down-time. I figured a upgrade of ram would help me out when I start to get lagged out during large-scale war. Meh.

So now the question is, 2gigs dual channel, or 3 gigs non dual channel? I'm guessing the 3-gigs.

Tim