Yet another problem with newly installed RAM

[amh1]

Hello all. I am new to the boards and I am having a big problem with the RAM I just bought for one of my laptops. I have an IBM Thinkpad T30 2.0 Gz Pentium 4. It came with 2 sticks of 256mb PC2100 DDR SoDIMM RAM. When I checked out buying upgrades for it, I found that the PC2700 should alsowork for this laptop, so I bought 2 sticks of 512mb PC2700. Now, no matter what I do, the laptop will only read one stick.. even if I put back in the RAM it came with it only reads what is in slot 1 and thinks slot 2 is empty. I have updated all drivers on the machine and it still refuses to see the other slot. The only time I got it to see the other one was to reseat it when the computer was booted and reboot, but then it would either freeze or would work fine until I tried to reboot again and then would not boot up.

Both sticks are good, as I currently have the other 512 in my other laptop and it is reading it fine. Can anyone help me?

Thanks,
Anna

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Take a very good look (using a magnifier) at those memory slots. You may have some dirt in one of them, perhaps you do not insert them correctly and all the way, or maybe you damaged a slot when you removed the old memory. They should fit in in only one way.
Take 'em all out, then reinsert them.Try different combinations old/new as well.
You can go to www.memtest.org and get memtest86, to do a testrun on that memory. You'll either need a floppy or a bootable CD. Instructions on the website.

 

[amh1]

Thanks

Thanks for your reply. I have tried various combinations of both old, new and memory out of my other laptop (which is same type/speed as new). If the slot is damaged, is there anyway to repair it? If not, will buying and installing a 1gb card in the working slot give me 1gb of memory (1gb is the max for this laptop)? The cards do only fit in there one way.. I can boot the laptop with a card in slot 1 and leave slot 2 empty, but I cannot boot with only a card in slot 2.. I just get beeps - so I think the slot might be damaged.