what size increments do dimms of ram come in??

Question

i thought they were 32 64 128 256 512 1024 etc. but my friend's laptop says she has 192 on only 1 dimm of ram. am i right in assuming that her ram is dying thus causing her laptop to give a SMART failure notice before it boots windows? she should have 256???

Answer 1

I've sure never seen a single 192 Mb chip. There was probably 64 Mb built-in to the laptop and then a 128 Mb chip added into the single upgrade slot. so she thinks there is just one chip. And I think a SMART failure notice means the hard drive is going out, not the RAM.

Edit: another possibilty... sometimes the graphics card shares the system memory, thus making it unavailable to the rest of the computer. For example sometimes a computer might show 120 Mb of RAM because the graphics card uses 8 Mb for its video buffer. So it might be a 256 Mb chip and 64 Mb being used for the video. Just a thought.

Answer 2

If your friends laptop has 192, then either it has 64 meg build into the system board (which is common for laptop) and a 128 meg chip. Or it has 256 meg of memory, but 64 meg of it has been reassigned for use by the video card so it does not show as being available to Windows (which is common for desktop, but not laptops). Easy way to tell is to pop the memory chip and boot the PC. If it has build in memory it will boot. If it does not, it will "beep" until you replace the memory. (Check the chip and see if it has a memory size on it, but look up the model number on the web).

SMART is a hard drive technology, not a memory chip term. So a SMART error is probably referring to an issue with the hard drive, not the memory. (Wish you had listed the complete error message - Google it for details). So I do not believe that the memory is bad in the PC. Normally if you have only one chip and it is bad, the PC does not boot. It is all or nothing with most memory chips.

Answer 3

They do come in 8, 16, 32.. up to 2048 I've seen.

192 isnt with 1 chip its with 2. if u think it only has 1 ur mistaken.

I have a computer that has 192 also, It game with a 64 back in the day and i put ina nother 128 a few years later.

Answer 4

Well sometimes a computer can read the chip wrong. Like I have 1024 mb of ram but no matter what it always tells me I have 1020. It still runs the same but sometimes It jsut shows up wrong.

Answer 5

2 possibilities.

1) some laptop come with built-in RAM. It could be that the built-in ram is 64MB, and the single slot is 128MB.

2) the laptop have shared graphic memory. The slot is 256MB, and 64MB is allocated to the graphic memory, so left with 192MB.