Above and Beyond the X20 Maximum RAM Limit?

[bluemonq]

Recently I picked up a X20 to fix up, as a birthday present from a Broke College Student(tm) to a Broke College Student with a Dying Laptop(tm). It came with 192MB, 64 of which is soldered in. I learned that the chipset can support 512MB; however, there's no way I can bump it past 320MB...officially, at least.

Is there some way to disable the first memory slot (like on my desktop, which is sort of dumb, but I digress....) so I can slot in a 512MB module?

[tfflivemb2]

In the 600/770 series, there was a way to hack the BIOS to disable the onboard ram, via the hex editor.

To my knowledge, no one has figured out how to disable it in the X20. The X and T series do not have this same feature, as the 600/770 series had.

[bluemonq]

Well that's a little disappointing, but thanks. I guess the logical follow up would be, are there any documented cases of desoldeirng the onboard RAM and replacing it with a larger chip?

[tfflivemb2]

If I am not mistaken, it isn't a matter of desoldering the old one and replacing it with a larger one...they are not standard ram sticks that are just soldered to the board...maybe you could figure out where the ram chip is and desolder it so that the board doesn't see it. This could, in theory, provide you with the ability to use a 512mb stick in the regular slot, IF they made a 512mb stick that would work in the X20. I think that the X20 uses PC100, and I don't think that there was ever a 512mb PC100 stick made, but I could be wrong.

[bluemonq]

The chips exist, although they don't come cheap. PC133 also could be an alternative. Right now though, I'm kinda nervous about the entire matter, since it requires doing something serious to the motherboard AND I don't know which chips would have a shot at working. Was sort of of hoping that I could find someone who's done something like this before

[asiafish]

I'd look at downgrading the OS to Win2K instead of upgrading the RAM to 512MB. Even at 512MB XP can be a bit sluggish with all of the security updates enabled.

I have a 750MHz Pentium III Toshiba (Portege 4000) that is maxed out at 512MB and is MUCH faster with Windows 2000 than Windows XP SP2.

[bluemonq]

My decision to go with XP instead of 2000 was based on a couple of factors:
1) The laptop did have a COA + serial for W2K, but I wasn't able to obtain any copies with SP4. Would rather not apply a massive SP on top of the original install.
2) W2K is no longer supported (in terms of fixes) by MS.
3) The laptop is for someone else, who's current system runs XP.
4) Thanks to nLite, I've managed to pare down XP with SP2 to only requiring ~60MB of RAM while running full bore, with a total HDD footprint just north of 400MB. It's quite snappy, actually. I guess I'll just have to be content with 320 then...