PC133 SDRAM - just on the off chance

Essentially correct but new IDE drives are still available and 80 wire cables are still included with new motherboards from all the major manufacturers.

SATA has still not gained full status with case manufacturers who are still supplyig PSUs with only Molex connections, requiring a conversion cable where SATA drives are specified.

JG

Possibly because you need some sort of ide/PATA for optical drives anyway...

Guessing, they probably don't make slow IDE chips any more, and need to use ide133 chips, so supplying an 80 wire cable, as opposed to a 40-wire cable, to a single IDE header, which allows a single PATA drive functionality plus temporary connection of an old PATA dive, is a cheap investment in backwards connectivity - besides, don't some optical drives need 80-wire cables anyway?

However I sort-of agree, eg you can still buy mobos which don't have SATA - though I wouldn't recommend it.

Yeah, that's strange, but adapters are about 50p, and sometimes SATA drives come with them. Early SATA drives had Molexes iirc.

-- Peter Fairbrother

I could never figure out how an 80 wire cable performed better that a 40 wire considering the connector on the end of each cable only had 40 pins.

Archie

The connectors are a bit special, they all connect the odd (or even) numbered wires to earth. This lowers crosstalk between the wires, so faster speeds can be used.

The blue connector also connects pin 34 to earth so as to let the devices know an 80-wire cable is in use, and it doesn't connect pin 34 to wire 34; and the grey connector doesn't connect pin 28 to wire 28, for master/slave cable select.

-- Peter Fairbrother

Since we are on about older computers, just had this from alt.humor.best-of-usenet

Just got them and stuck them in :) Everything running happily at 512mb. The old girl's immediately much quicker browsing and accessing newsgroups. Many thanks Archie. If anyone wants my ECC chips for a server type machine they're welcome to them.

Drat, I spoke too soon I think. It's crashing for England now. Firefox going down and refusing to restart, Utorrent doing the same. When I've got more time I'll download a memory tester and see if it's just one stick playing up but for now I've put the two ECC modules back in. Ah well, it was worth a try.

Try running your machine with one 256M module at a time and see if the machine is stable.

Archie

Right, well one of the 256mb sticks was definitely not working. I fairly quickly got a spontaneous reboot with just that one in and then later an actual BSOD with dire warnings to remove any recently fitted hardware. Never had one of those before. I didn't realise they actually were blue. The second stick seems to be ok and I couldn't get it to crash with just that in on its own. I did get one crash when I added the old 128mb stick to it but I moved that to the third slot instead of the second and added one of my 64mb sticks in the second and it's been working ok all night. Maybe something hadn't been seated perfectly. So I'm up to 448mb out of the possible 512mb which is not too bad.

So my choices seeing as it's a max of 512mb and I can only populate 4 rows out of the 6 on the MB (3 double sided slots) are to find another good double sided 256mb pc133 stick or another single sided 128mb pc133 stick to add to the existing 128mb single sided one in there and remove the single sided 64mb pc100 one in there which will be slowing the whole lot to 100 anyway - or just to leave it well alone now.

I must confess, my test was to plug it in and watch the BIOS count up. I do have some 128M modules (including the ones marked 256)-I will have another lookto see what's there.

Archie

Well it's been rock steady for 30 plus hours now without a reboot with 1 x

256mb + 1 x128mb + 1 x 64mb (448mb) chips in it. To be honest trying to get the last 64mb in there to bring it up to the full 512mb would be gilding the lily - or maybe trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear given how old and crappy this pc is. I'm well happy as it stands. I'm also more than happy to donate a couple of beer tokens to try a final 128mb PC133 single sided chip alongside the existing one just to prove a point.

The basic Intel motherboard and ancilliaries are so stable on this old thing I think it might last for ever and it surely does everything I really need to such an acceptable standard and speed that I could probably live with it forever. Only if I were to want to do highly intensive cpu tasks like video editing or gaming would I really need a modern machine. For web surfing and general downloading it's fast enough.

I suppose the car equivalent would be bangernomics. Running a 10 year old clunker so that someone else has paid for the depreciation without radically reducing the utility of the machine. I did used to be a fan of that too until got my Focus and decided that spending your time underneath old cars fixing them was not an ideal way to spend my time. At least fixing pc's can be done indoors, in the warm and dry, and without ruining your back lifting things. Swapping RAM chips is not so onerous.

We have some 128mb 'sync' PC133 modules and a couple of 64mb, the only 256mb's are DDR types.

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Rushden, UK snipped-for-privacy@prepair.co.uk

I found another 256M module and left it running overnight in a machine together with 2x128Ms. They look OK so I'll put them in the post.

Your comment on cars bring back a memories of changing the clutch on my Cortina Estate. This was done in the street with wife inside the car helping with a rope a bit of wood to support the gearbox. A short time later I was in the Ford garage for something else and saw a sign up offering a replacement clutch job for about the same price as I had paid for the parts. Still limping with the kick I gave myself.

Archie

Cheers Archie :) It's been fine for over 2 days now on the chips currently in it btw so at least my baseline is now a minimum of 448mb. Just to remind you the 128 sticks need to be single sided i.e. only having chips on one side of the board or I'll exceed my 4 rows limit if they have to go in along with a double sided 256mb stick.

I remember doing both the engine and gearbox on my Marina when I was about

20, outside on a gravel track, no engine hoist and no help and no real fears about managing it. I seem to recall lowering the engine to the ground once I'd got the mounts off then jacking the car as high as I could get it and dragging it out from underneath. Then there was some faffing about with me on my back lowering the box onto my chest and sliding it off me sideways. I have no memory at all of how I got them back in though but clearly I must have done. Just doing a set of brake pads 30 years later is enough to ruin my day. I'm too old for all this crap now.

Got them thanks Archie. Although neither the manual or the Crucial website were very clear about it the new single sided 256mb chip works fine alongside the first double sided 256mb chip you sent so apparently there wasn't a limit of 128mb per row. So that's me up to 512mb and it's been running happily for a day now. I did cheekily try adding another 128mb chip in the 3rd slot but it only counted up to 512mb as the manual said it would. I'd upgraded to the latest BIOS I could find on the Intel website and was rather hoping that might have got round the original memory limit but fraid not. Anyway 512mb is plenty for XP and the stuff I use it for. If one of the

256mb chips goes down I also have the backup of two 128mb ones to swap in instead which is nice.

It's weird thinking back to my first pc, an Amstrad 1512 which I bought in

1987 and which still works perfectly btw, which also has 512 of ram - except it's 512kb not mb. I vaguely recall paying a small fortune to upgrade it to 640kb from 512kb and I paid another £300 for a 20mb (yes mb not gb) hard disk which back then was a serious amount of money. From memory it ran at 8mHz and this one runs at 733mHz (which is still pathetic by today's standards) so with 100 times faster processor and 1000 times more memory where have we actually got to? I still use the same old Dos spreadsheet I did back then because I never got round to really learning Excel. Most applications back then came on a single floppy diskette and did everything you really needed. I've never really understood why modern applications need 100mb of disk space but do bugger all extra compared to things that were written into a few hundred kb 20 years ago. Oh and beer only cost a few pence a pint and the bread tasted better and my back didn't ache and my eyes could focus at 6 inches instead of 12. Grumble moan.

By sheer coincidence someone was helping me clear out the spare room on Friday and came across a bunch of IDE cables of which one was an 80 strand item which I now realise actually was the one I'd had installed in my previous pc. It's grey not white like all the other cables and I now clearly remember using it. Not knowing the difference it made I must have swapped the disk into this current pc using an older 40 strand cable that would probably already have been inside it. So anyway I slapped that in instead and my hard disk says it's now running in UDMA mode 6 instead of mode 2 although to be honest I can't actually tell it's going any faster during file transfers. It must be doing summat though.

I think that's everything I can do to make this old beast run as fast as possible so hopefully after so much buggering about the motherboard or cpu or power supply won't now suddenly decide to call it a day and put me back to square one. If it keeps working I reckon it'll do me for a goodly while.

I now owe someone a favour in return to balance my karma and keep the world turning smoothly on its axis.