Ram upgrade issues with dell dim 2400

[roundcircle]

i am trying to upgarde a friends box, he has a dell dim 2400 with a 2.19 ghz intel 4 and 128 meg dd ram. i am trying to upgarde the ram. i have tried 5 sticks now. i tried a 1 gig 3200 stick, but figured maybe the motherboard couldnt handle the dim so i went down to a 512 stick, which didnt work, and now i am trying 2 256 sticks, which i tested on my box this morning. when i try to boot off the new sticks the motherboard just beeps, and it wont boot. if i put in the old stick to boot off of it and then a new stick it says "memory not expected lessing available memory" or some such **** a few times and then stops trying to boot. i am not sure if it is the board, or the bios. supposdly the machine can handle 444 ddr ram upto 1.2 gigs. any help would be wonderful as none of the people at dell seem to know what they are talking about

 

[vnf4ultra]

Well, here's the spec sheet for your pc.
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim2400/en/sm_en/specs.htm
It seems the max ram for your system is having 2 512mb dimms of pc2700 ram.
pc3200 should work though, since it can downclock to pc2700 speed.

Are you replacing the 128mb or adding this in addition to the old ram?
Do you know the new ram is good?

 

[mailpup]

Hmmm. According to the Dell website, it can handle up to 1024MB of DDR SDRAM, PC3200 / 400 MHz, at least when I used their memory selector. Is this the type you're using?

 

[Tedster]

Dell uses proprietary memory. If you're not using DELL branded memory, you'll run into problems.

 

[roundcircle]

according to the spec sheet the ram we were using should be working. like i said i tried using 2 sticks of 256 3200 a stick of 512 2700 and a 1.0g stick of 3200. none of them work. we are trying to replace the 128 stick. it is old and slow and ****ty, like his pc sadly. i figured that dell might have it rigged to make me buy us buy their ram.

and yes the ram is good, it was all tested on my box. in fact i have the gig stick that wouldnt work running the box i am on right now.

 

[Tedster]

then if you know the RAM is good and you verified it, then the RAM slots or some other hardware has failed on the motherboard. If it is an ancient motherboard, then perhaps your CMOS battery is failing. I would check that, but it is not worth spending a whole lot of money on a old system. I would build a newer system and salvage the parts.