Thinkpad 1124i memory issue

[tim S]

I was fortunate enough to snag one of these units from the Marketplace here.
There is one issue with the machine though.
Sometime in it's life someone cut off one of the soldered on memory chips,
essentially to disable the on board memory. They then added a 256mb memory stick
and so the machine shows 256mb memory.
All well and good but I find the unit is slow without the on board ram and I can't
add any operating system. All others, even Linux, shows too little
memory. Actually Linux shows 255mb of memory and stops!
My question is the stick at fault? Or, can I cut an onboard chip out of a 240X
board and try to resolder it (sounds like a real pain!) onto the 112i's board?

Thanks for any help

Tim S

[pianowizard]

Have you tried MEMTEST86?

The onboard RAM was disabled so that the 256MB module could be used - quite a few people have done this to the 240X. With the onboard RAM intact, you can only put a 128MB stick into the slot, giving you a total of only 192MB. I have heard of 192MB sticks but they are extremely rare and pricey.

[tim S]

Yes I realized that but the onboard memory is really fast as opposed
to the stick. So less is probably better/faster in this case!
But I don't understand why I can't add an OS regardless of speed.

Tim S

[pianowizard]

Yes I realized that but the onboard memory is really fast as opposed
to the stick. So less is probably better/faster in this case!

Absolutely not. The 256MB stick is PC100, just like the onboard RAM. So why would you think the onboard RAM is faster? I once used a 240X with just the 64MB onboard RAM to run WinXP and it was really, really slow. When I had your i1124, it was just barely noticeably slower than my Dell desktop which has 800MHz PIII, 512MB PC100 RAM and a 20GB 7200rpm HDD. What kind of hard drive are you using? I had a 100GB 7200rpm drive in the i1124. BTW, it wasn't me who disabled the onboard RAM.

But I don't understand why I can't add an OS regardless of speed.

You mean adding a second OS? I installed Win98SE without any issue, and then upgraded from that to XP Pro also without any problem.