HP Pavillion Memory Paradox!

[Peter_Peril]

I recently acquired an HP Pavilion ZE4805US laptop. The HDD had crashed and the CPU cooler was chock full of dust and dirt. but other than that it looked to be in good shape. So I broke it down and cleaned out the cooler; the HDD was a total loss though so I replaced it with a 160GB Seagate.

I was fortunate to have the Recovery CD for the laptop and setup of the new drive was quick and easy. The system came [configged] with 256 MB of DDR 333, so I threw in another 256MB of the same and everything was golden. Now here's the paradox--I brought A GB of DDR 333 to replace the other 512 Installed; same stuff DDR 333 512 per dimm...and it won't work! System just cycles on and off. Not even a beep code.

The new dimms are A Data 512MB-- they are new, low density and they both work in my T30; the same as the dimms I'm attempting to replace. I tried a single 1GB high density dimm from my T30 and got the same bahavior on the HP (on/off cycling).

I'm considering the maker A Data as the culprit here, Some reports say their dimms won't work in this system, yet others report this stuff is as good as generic ram gets. I'm going to pull the CMOS and ascertain if this will reset the bios.

In a related turn of events soon after setting up the HP my T30 HDD suffered a similiar fate-- read: Disk Read Error. I was able to salvage it using Hitachi's excellent DFT Utility Software. Although I'm not cetain if I want to trust the drive to hold anything again...once bitten twice shy.

[BeeJayEmm]

Peter,
According to this page, the max. RAM per slot is 512 MB, so that's why the 1GB chip won't boot. Since the 2 512s exhibit the same behavior, I think you're correct that the HP doesn't want to play with them. Hopefully, you can exchange the RAM.

Brian