Ram upgrade

Hello Everyone, I am new to the forum. I do have a question though. I have three older computers, all are HP Vectra VL420s. Each has three ram slots. Crucial.com tells me that all will take three 512 Ram sticks. One took all three, but the other two will only take two of the 512 sticks and a 256 stick. I updated the BIOS to the latest that HP has. Not sure what I am doing wrong. The new Ram is good. I swapped them into the positions that accepts them, but no change. I would like to have 512 in each Ram slot. Can anyone help?

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

You can try one stick at a time; install one stick, power on, power down, install the 2nd stick, power on, power down, install the 3rd stick, power on, etc. If that doesn't work, maybe there's a limit in the BIOS? or maybe a motherboard jumper that limits the RAM? or maybe the video is sharing a big chunk of the memory? It's hard to say. Older computers (esp HP and Compaq for some reason) tend to be much more finicky about accepting memory, and if it's older 168pin SDRAM then it can be even trickier. You may be stuck with the 1.25gb in the 2 systems, and that's not too bad. It's not much different than 1.5gb and you're not likely to really notice any difference in performance overall. Some intensive tasks (like video processing for example) might go a bit faster on the 1.5gb system, but I really doubt you'll notice the difference.

 

Each board has three slots? Do you have AMD processors in those machines?

What's the speed of the memory? Look for "PC2700" or "PC2100" or similar numbers on all your modules, and list them as accurately as possible. You might need to slow the RAM speed down to be able to populate all three slots with 512MB modules.