Maxing out the RAM on T42p

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pramit · #1 Post by **pramit** » Fri May 28, 2004 3:13 pm

My T42p (2379DYU) is being processed. I'm researching RAM. The system ships with a 512MB SODIMM, but supports a max of 2GB (2x 1GB SODIMMs). Does anyone have a recommendation on where to buy RAM? So far, I have the following prices (again, they are for the 1GB 200 pin SODIMM that's DDR PC2700)

Crucial: $449.99 (they only have the T41p listed, but the RAM specs are the same)
(link: http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts. ... &submit=Go)

Kingston: $713.00
(link: http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configu ... it1=Search)

OEMPCWorld: $258.85
(link: http://configurator.oempcworld.com/resu ... elid=41045)

IBM: $656.00
(link: http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/products.nsf/ ... CCE#Memory)

Any suggestions on which of these you'd recommend? Or any other vendor/ retailer?

Thanks!

LinuxGuy75 · #2 Post by **LinuxGuy75** » Fri May 28, 2004 3:20 pm

After havings lots of little niggling compatibility issues and bad ram with various Internet vendors we switched to using 100% crucial ordered ram.

We've never had any problems since, and the prices are quite good, and free 2nd day shipping is good too.

I'd highly recommend Crucial.

csv96 · #3 Post by **csv96** » Fri May 28, 2004 4:02 pm

You can find genuine IBM PC2700 1gb SODIMMs on ebay for almost half of list price.

tyipengr · #4 Post by **tyipengr** » Fri May 28, 2004 4:05 pm

I've never had problems with Crucial memory, and its assembled in the USA (to the best of my knowledge).

cynic · #5 Post by **cynic** » Fri May 28, 2004 4:37 pm

tyipengr wrote: its assembled in the USA (to the best of my knowledge).

I'm kind of curious as to why that's important. AFAIK, there is no RAM produced in America any longer and all the clean rooms for RAM are overseas too. Micron/Crucial are an American company, though.

awolfe63 · #6 Post by **awolfe63** » Fri May 28, 2004 6:18 pm

Not at all true.

Crucial is a subsidiary of Micron. They manufacture most if not all of their DRAM in the US - much of it right next to where french fries come from.

cynic · #7 Post by **cynic** » Fri May 28, 2004 7:34 pm

I went over Micron's investor relations and the only US manufacturing plant mentioned is one in Virginia. It was going to be ramped up at the end of 2003 for 512 DRAM manufacturing, but was at the time of the report scaled back while undergoing upgrading. The Singapore TECH joint venture seems to produce a lot and Micron also bought Toshiba's DRAM division.

The only other thing I took note of is the 450 million Intel poured into Micron in exchange for stock (to ensure production of certain types of RAM.)

(I take it the fries reference was to Micron being based in Idaho...)

Reshesnik · #8 Post by **Reshesnik** » Fri May 28, 2004 10:20 pm

http://www.ocsystem.com/mi1gbpc26ddr.html

279 for a 1gb micron stick.

Check pricewatch.com and slickdeals.net

#9 Post by **erik** » Fri May 28, 2004 10:36 pm

most ibm-branded sodimms i've purchased had crucial stickers on them installed at no extra charge.

-erik

tyipengr · #10 Post by **tyipengr** » Sat May 29, 2004 2:53 am

cynic wrote:
tyipengr wrote: its assembled in the USA (to the best of my knowledge).
I'm kind of curious as to why that's important. AFAIK, there is no RAM produced in America any longer and all the clean rooms for RAM are overseas too. Micron/Crucial are an American company, though.

No, I checked Micron's website and they still make some, not all, of their stuff in the US.

http://www.micron.com/locations/us.html

It's not important but I always thought it was quirky that someone still makes memory in the US when most companies gave up on that back in the 80's.

I don't know if you guys heard of this but the Taiwanese accused Micron of dumping in the memory market a few years ago. I always thought it was so peculiar that a US company that wasn't subsidized by the government could actually manufacture something in the US and actually "dump" it and not kill their own company because of the costs associated with manufacturing in the US.

I gotta give them credit for doing what everyone else can't. Btw, all the memory I've purchased from Crucial comes smelling like peanuts, it is really weird but I have made at least 15 seperate orders and they all smell like peanuts. I'd expect them to smell like potatoes before peanuts.

awolfe63 · #11 Post by **awolfe63** » Sat May 29, 2004 12:38 pm

Three of Micron's 8 manufacturing sites are in the US - Idaho, VA, Utah. The Boise site, which I have visited, has numerous fabs on site. They make a lot of product in the US.

taphil · #12 Post by **taphil** » Sat May 29, 2004 3:26 pm

This may be a naive question, but: What things do you guys do on the computer that require 2GB of RAM?

JeffNT326 · #13 Post by **JeffNT326** » Sat May 29, 2004 4:05 pm

This may be a naive question, but: What things do you guys do on the computer that require 2GB of RAM?

Mmmm, when you have 30 ie windows open, playing mp3's while burning a dvd, autocad is open, while your editing a 2048x1536 picture in photoshop; that would easily eat up 2 gb of ram.

But really, it's to help ease the computer from having to constantly swap from hd to ram. It's also a great way to have a ram-drive set as your swap drive.

Roy_W · #14 Post by **Roy_W** » Sat May 29, 2004 5:36 pm

JeffNT326 wrote:
This may be a naive question, but: What things do you guys do on the computer that require 2GB of RAM?
Mmmm, when you have 30 ie windows open, playing mp3's while burning a dvd, autocad is open, while your editing a 2048x1536 picture in photoshop; that would easily eat up 2 gb of ram.

But really, it's to help ease the computer from having to constantly swap from hd to ram. It's also a great way to have a ram-drive set as your swap drive.

Anyone that is doing all that at the same time is probably doing nothing at all.

I asked myself the same question the other day and I tried to fill up 512 Mb of RAM. Before managing to fill up the RAM you run into other problems. Only a certain number of programs can read from disk at a time regardless of how much RAM you have. Yes the programs DO have to read from the disk initially and almost no programmer will dynamically allocate 2Gb of RAM.

Certain games might demand 2Gb but then again a game that requires 2Gb of dynamic memory will probably fall through because of a Graphics card bottleneck.

Who the hell can MENTALLY manage to burn cds, concentrate on autocad, listen to MP3, graphically design in Photoshop and I dont know what else at the same

I would state that anyone using 2 Go of RAM is certainly not capable of exploiting such an intense usage on a portable PC, something else is going to bottleneck long before you are ever capable of exploiting such a capacity. please prove me wrong otherwise.

And why on earth would you need a Swap drive when you have 2Gb of RAM, that just doesn't make sense.

I completely understand Taphil's question and I find it far from naive to ask oneself's how on earth someone can reasonablly fill up 2Gb on a portable computer.

C'mon guys lets get serious ............

JeffNT326 · #15 Post by **JeffNT326** » Sat May 29, 2004 6:29 pm

um..i was answering the above poster's question.

Actually, regardless of how much ram you have, windows still sets aside some hd space for swapping...having a ram-drive set as your only swap drive really lessens the time windows takes to access the hd.

awolfe63 · #16 Post by **awolfe63** » Sat May 29, 2004 6:41 pm

Even though Windows always sets up a swap drive - it should never use it if you have enough RAM. Using RAM for swap should never improve things. Unless there is some serious flaw in the OS, it should use all of RAM first before going to swap space.

akerman · #17 Post by **akerman** » Sat May 29, 2004 7:13 pm

I know laptop ram are different from desktop ram - but how are the usually referred to? Because if I search for "SODIMM" on eBay, I get only a few results.. there should be tons!

btw Roy_W - are you French??

#18 Post by **erik** » Sat May 29, 2004 7:26 pm

Roy_W wrote:I completely understand JeffNT326's question and I find it far from naive to ask oneself's how on earth someone can reasonablly fill up 2Gb on a portable computer.

C'mon guys lets get serious ............

my R50p is my main computer since i travel a lot and need to take every bit of power with me. i typically have illustrator, photoshop, and indesign open simultaneously throughout my day. the swap files for illustrator and photoshop alone are 512mb each due to working on 200+mb files, which are much larger while in production due to saving 10+ steps of undo. the last mechanical drawing that i produced in solidworks took 5 minutes to render using every bit of my 1gb ram. size-wise, solidworks makes autocad look like a joke -- even though i own and use both.

when your main job is graphic and industrial design and a thinkpad is your only weapon of choice, it is very easy to utilize 2gb ram. i will be purchasing a second 1gb stick shortly. then again, maybe i'm just naive...

but, i agree, your average thinkpad user probably won't fully utilize 2gb of ram.

-erik

cynic · #19 Post by **cynic** » Sun May 30, 2004 12:39 am

awolfe63 wrote:Even though Windows always sets up a swap drive - it should never use it if you have enough RAM. Using RAM for swap should never improve things. Unless there is some serious flaw in the OS, it should use all of RAM first before going to swap space.

Doesn't work that way, sadly enough. Try eliminating your paging file (zero it out) and see what happens to performance...

not pretty

cynic · #20 Post by **cynic** » Sun May 30, 2004 12:46 am

There's music sampler that we use that can take 1GB on it's own while running (it has to preload each instruments samples so that you have an "always on" state when you hit the keyboard.) Then you have that set to connect to the sequencer (which also uses at least 256MB while running) and that's before you put any post-processing sound algorithms (convoluting reverb) to create the proper room delays. So just playing with some really great spatialization will take up most of 2GB.

...and this is with nothing else running just 1 host application (the sequencer) and 2 "plugins" (reverb and sampler)

We have a few desktops at work with 4GB of RAM.

Roy_W · #21 Post by **Roy_W** » Sun May 30, 2004 3:17 am

[
but, i agree, your average thinkpad user probably won't fully utilize 2gb of ram.

-erik[/quote]

Average in this case would probably amount to 90% of the Thinkpad population, n'est ce pas.

I agree that there is a small populace that would actually require 2gb or even more but they are a select few.

Akerman: No I am not French.

jeroenp · #22 Post by **jeroenp** » Sun May 30, 2004 10:44 am

Roy_W wrote:I would state that anyone using 2 Go of RAM is certainly not capable of exploiting such an intense usage on a portable PC, something else is going to bottleneck long before you are ever capable of exploiting such a capacity. please prove me wrong otherwise.

I'm parsing 350 meg+ sized XML files coming from a client's Siebel HR (don't ask <g>) on a desktop w/ 1Gb RAM and it was constantly swapping.
Brought the size down to some 60 megabyt by some tweaking with Delphi (both memory and duration in O(N) <g>), and now it is bearable: only occassionally swapping.

I know that the off-the-shelve XML parsers are not good at this, but I don't want to go the C++ route.
2Gb of memory would allow me to run the parsing next to regular development on the same machine while being on the road.

Roy_W wrote:And why on earth would you need a Swap drive when you have 2Gb of RAM, that just doesn't make sense.

You don't. NT4 and up much more efficiently use the RAM than the SWAP-file.
My experience is that adding extra RAM is usually much better to boost performance than CPU-speed, or disk-speed.

For most systems (server and desktop), I usually max out the RAM, then go for fast (if possible SCSI) disks, then for faster processors.
For disk performance, it usually pays off to buy less smaller disks than few larger disks. Spreading the load accross multiple spindles is a very efficient way to boost performance.

That's why I was hoping that IBM would continue the 3-spindle design of the A31p in their top-of-the-line machines.

--jeroen

Roy_W · #23 Post by **Roy_W** » Mon May 31, 2004 3:27 pm

jeroenp wrote: I'm parsing 350 meg+ sized XML files coming from a client's Siebel HR (don't ask <g>) on a desktop w/ 1Gb RAM and it was constantly swapping.

If you have 1gb why is there any swapping, I presume that this ia a 350/ 60 meg flat file

There appears to be some other problem here, unless of course the parser was written without any consideration for physical constraints. A 350 Meg file sounds like it should already be extracted directly into a Database.

jeroenp wrote: Brought the size down to some 60 megabyt by some tweaking with Delphi (both memory and duration in O(N) <g>), and now it is bearable: only occassionally swapping.

This really doesn't sound quite right, you can load that file more than 10 times into physical RAM. Maybe the XML schema needs to be thought out again.

jeroenp wrote: I know that the off-the-shelve XML parsers are not good at this, but I don't want to go the C++ route.
2Gb of memory would allow me to run the parsing next to regular
development on the same machine while being on the road.

Only if the parser has been written correctly.

jeroenp wrote: My experience is that adding extra RAM is usually much better to boost performance than CPU-speed, or disk-speed.

I agree up to a certain point, you can give XP more than 350 Mb of RAM but it will not run an faster. Certain applications/games will though.

jeroenp wrote: For most systems (server and desktop), I usually max out the RAM, then go for fast (if possible SCSI) disks, then for faster processors.

Thats the never ending story of computing in general.

jeroenp wrote: For disk performance, it usually pays off to buy less smaller disks than few larger disks. Spreading the load accross multiple spindles is a very efficient way to boost performance.

RAID setups can greatly improve system performance but unfortunately it wasn't really designed with IBM Thinkpads in mind.

jpresto · #24 Post by **jpresto** » Mon May 31, 2004 8:42 pm

Here's another reason: VMWare - which will grab a chunk of memory for a session.

BTW, I have a 42p here, and it only had a single mem slot from what I can tell. Does this mean that we're stuck with whatever mem we ordered with the unit (me: 512) plus 1 gb?

Thanks - Joe

Nabeel · #25 Post by **Nabeel** » Mon May 31, 2004 8:47 pm

Yes, but I think you may be able to upgrade the memory the machine came with, it's under the keyboard IIRC.

At work, we have a machine for video processing stuff, it's a dual CPU, 2.4ghz IIRC, with 2gb of ram, and that slows down quite a bit when we run our programs and algorithms on it. The average user may not need that much ram, but business users might.

I also noticed on my T42, when I first booted it up, I got my machine with base 256mb of ram, and only 25 or so was available. After I cleaned out the machine, about 120mb or so was available. I hate it when they preload all of their crap, bogs the machine down alot.

cynic · #26 Post by **cynic** » Mon May 31, 2004 9:10 pm

jpresto wrote: Does this mean that we're stuck with whatever mem we ordered with the unit (me: 512) plus 1 gb?

No. The other slot is under the keyboard. IBM has movies and instructions on their support website on how to remove the keyboard. These are both customer-installable parts.

jpresto · #27 Post by **jpresto** » Mon May 31, 2004 9:16 pm

excellent, thanks for the replies.

akeskira · #28 Post by **akeskira** » Mon May 31, 2004 11:57 pm

gpvillamil · #29 Post by **gpvillamil** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 2:20 am

Well, here's something I do that needs all that RAM: I use a visual effects program called Pilgrim (www.pilgrim-visuals.com) for VJing.

So I need a portable machine to take to clubs.

I also need 128MB of RAM on the graphics card, because Pilgrim can map multiple stored AND live video feeds onto OpenGL textures, which you can use in 3D models. So for example, you can have a spinning cube and on each face have a different video playing - including two live feeds from cameras.

The program has a built-in 3D modelling/scene creation engine, which is pretty sensitive to CPU speed and the graphics card.

In order to respond quickly, Pilgrim can preload multiple video clips and 3D scenes. So a reasonably sized show can fill up 2GB.

When I'm using Pilgrim in production mode, everything else on the PC is shut down, and it still pushes the limits of the hardware. After about 5 minutes, the fan in my T41p is running at full speed, blasting out hot air.

So maybe 2GB RAM, fancy graphics card with lots of VRAM etc are necessary for some.

awolfe63 · #30 Post by **awolfe63** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 1:05 pm

cynic wrote:
awolfe63 wrote:Even though Windows always sets up a swap drive - it should never use it if you have enough RAM. Using RAM for swap should never improve things. Unless there is some serious flaw in the OS, it should use all of RAM first before going to swap space.
Doesn't work that way, sadly enough. Try eliminating your paging file (zero it out) and see what happens to performance...

not pretty

I did - seems fine when I do it on a machine with enough RAM.

Maxing out the RAM on T42p

Maxing out the RAM on T42p

Micron

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