got RAM?

where does one get RAM? i only know tigerdirect and crucial, but i see other sites like kahlon undercutting them pricewise. and even amazon and buy.com seem to be in the business.

"cheapest" i can find, but with so many hundreds and hundreds of sites googling up, i don't have a feel for who's RELIABLE!

top 3 or 5 default places everyone here's using? thanks!

ddr pc2100 512k, btw.

 

I buy most of my stuff from Newegg, and the brands I tend to target as far as RAM goes are Crucial, Kingston, Corsair, in no particular order. If you do a search for RAM threads in the hardware forum you'll notice a lot of us recommend Crucial, at least their scanner.

The thing is, not all RAM is created equal, and the cheaper brands tend to be cheaper for a reason. The joy of buying at low price fades long before the pain of buying low quality does... the three brands I like have life-time warranties and good support, that's why I buy them. I've never needed to RMA any of my memory.

 

And the best bet is to look for non-ECC RAM for your machines.

 

Probably not agreed upon by most, but I buy from ebay. I built my server with 95% of the parts from ebay, including a total of 2.5gig of ECC ram. Bought it cheap enough that if it didn't work or only worked a short time, I wouldn't be out very much at all. So far the memory has lasted approx. 3+ years.

 

oddly enough, crucial doesn't carry it!

they have pc2700 which is backwards compatible, but the extra speed is just wasted. and it's $31.99 -- which I thought was cheap after seeing it in Staples for $38.99 -- but in the end the ones who DO have pc2100 are talking $20ish.

kahlon is the cheapest, and they claim "lifetime guarantee". are they a reliable place? it seems like a homebrand.

tigerdirect and newegg are a few bucks more. kingston and ultra.

and they're ALL non-ECC. i dunno what that even *means* (google...google...), but it seems to be a given once i punch in the PC model.

 

I have a stick(512MB) that you can have at a very low price(free).PM for info for shipping if you want it.

 

PC2100 hasn't been manufactured in years, that's probably why.

Error Checking and Correcting. Short and simple version: It means your computer isn't a server. More details? It means that if you get single-bit errors in the data going through the RAM they're not going to be corrected before the data is sent back out again. On a home PC, it's usually not needed either.

 

If you're just putzing around with your own home computer, use whatever el'cheapo brand you want.

But if you're a professional and your customers depend on your ability to provide them with the very best ram available, then you don't want to go for CHEAP.
You want only top quality ram that comes with a warranty and at a good price.

My favorite supplier for top quality (Micron) ram is Crucial.com
You can take the crucial scan to determine just what ram you need and even buy it right there and have it mailed right to your house. I do this a lot for my customers, who are seriously lacking in ram.

Be careful with those discount brands of ram. Many discount ram companies, including Kingston, PNY and Spectec, buy second grade ram chips from major manufacturers and rebrand them and put them on their own boards.
Early failure is common with this type of ram.

So as with many things, it's "Buyer Beware!" when you go for CHEAP.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

The Shadow

 

Define "early" for a failure. A month? A year? I'm am just "putzing", as you said, and a week ago I was scoping new PCs. I'll be happy if this thing lasts a full year for the cheapest price possible...it's prolly going in el dumpster long before that....

 

Well, CatT, ram is made from silicon. That's SAND to the non-techie.
It's been around for millions of years and will be around for at least that much longer unless someone melts it down to make a beer mug or something.

The ram in your computer should last a very long time indeed, unless it's adversely acted upon by lightning or some other outside force. For ram to fail completely in the first year of service, it was probably second grade to begin with and was malformed during manufacture.

I have some very good quality ram, that was showing signs of failure when it was only a few months old. If a memory cell is either open or shorted, it will show up at the same memory location every time a Memtest program is run. This was not the case with this particular ram. So, from past experience, I deduced that it was not a bad memory cell, but some kind of surface contamination. (dirt)

I took out both of the ram sticks (the newest ones) and washed them thoroughly in Denatured Alcohol. I just scrubbed the heck out of them with an old toothbrush.
After properly drying them, I reinstalled them and have had no more problems.
I did the same thing with an old video card, that was throwing colored pixels all over my screen. That was several years ago now and that old card is still running perfectly in my back-up system.

So there are various failure modes where ram is concerned and it's important to know why ram is failing before just throwing it away.
I would NEVER throw any ram away, without washing it first to make sure it wasn't just dirty.

Happy Holidays everyone!

The Shadow

 

From the speeds I'm getting, I suspect mine is still in the FORM of sand!

 

Well, speeding up PC's is what I've done, more of less for a living, for 29 years now.

To really get the performance that the hardware manufacturers built into the motherboards, CPU's and ram, takes a very concerted effort.
Maybe one out of a thousand tech's even addresses that aspect of the PC.

All the safe defaults built into Windows, for instance, makes good performance almost impossible. You must discard the old, slow defaults to ever get any kind of performance out of Windows.

For instance, a crucial part of the windows OS is the Kernel. Windows accesses its kernel thousands of times a day. By default, the kernel is kept on the hard drive, so access is fairly slow. But, built into Windows is the ability to upload that kernel to much faster RAM on bootup. It takes only a simple registry tweak to change a 0 to a 1 and the system performance takes a HUGE leap upwards as windows accesses its Kernel from FAST ram instead of a slow HD.

Many such improvements in performance can be had by just changing a few bits in the registry. But, that's probably food for another thread.

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?
The Shadow