Need help with a Gateway

Vicky_Vixen

Can anyone help?

I have an old Gateway (actually an ALR 7200 server) that I acquired second hand. It works as well as a Pentium II with 64Mbyte of RAM can work. I tried to revitalise it with some new RAM. I bought a 128Mbyte DIMM and it hangs the machine.

I boot up - the machine recognises the extra memory but as soon as it gets to launching windows (I've tried with 95, NT 4 and Win 2000) I get a memory error and the thing hangs.

Then when I soft boot - press the reset button - it only recognises the 64Mbyte that was originally in the machine and will only launch windows in safe mode.

I even upgraded the BIOS - very brave - but no joy.

There's nothing wrong with the memory. I stuck it into a Dell at work and there was no problem at all. I bought it off a web site that other people had recommended to me but I've been faffing around with BIOS es etc for so long I've lost the receipt.

What am I doing wrong? Apart from tolerating a heap of Gateway junk in my living room.

Kali

that machine only takes ECC ram..
basically a special type of RAM that performs error checking and is common in server machines... it will be slightly more expensive than normal memory though.

Mr. Fancypants

Did you try putting the 128MB stick in by itself into the Gateway?
You may need to have pairs of RAM (128 with 128)

Vicky_Vixen

Originally posted by mbroaders
Did you try putting the 128MB stick in by itself into the Gateway?

Yes. No joy.

Vicky_Vixen

Originally posted by Kali
that machine only takes ECC ram..

Hmm. I don't recall seeing that in the literature. But I'll investigate that option. Thanks.

Gerry

The machine will do perfectly well as a home file/mp3/email server with 64 megs of ram. Just throw some form of linux on it. Its not worth buying ecc ram for it so you can use it as a desktop machine, unless you can find ecc ram cheap second hand or something.

Kali

Originally posted by Vicky_Vixen


Hmm. I don't recall seeing that in the literature. But I'll investigate that option. Thanks.

http://www.micromax.com/computers/gateway/brochures/alr7000.pdf

spongebob

Even if you don't buy from them (and I would recommend them to anyone) Crucial have a great memory selector/matcher at

http://www.crucial.com/uk

select make and model of pc from a huge list and the memory spec appears

other than pins and speed the other key features appear on the right. It also tells you the number of banks and max memory.

ECC
Registered or not
CL 2 2.5 or 3 (to do with the clock cycle actions)

M

Vicky_Vixen

Thanks to everyone for all the help.

What a nice site!