X300 RAM Problem

[wingo]

Hi everyone,

I own a Thinkpad X300 for a couple of weeks now. After sending it in for replacement (due to a dead pixel out of the box), I received a replacement unit which seems to work fine.

Now that I am back in Germany, I wanted to upgrade my RAM from the original 1GB to 4GB and bought 4GB Kingston Value RAM (SO DIMM DDR2 800) which I use in my old x60s as well and that I installed in a friend's x61s from the US a couple of weeks ago successfully, too.

Now I found the X300 not booting up with any other RAM than the original Hynix 1GB module. I tried the new Kingston modules, I tried older MDT 1GB modules (that I was using in a different laptop for a while) and tried each of the new modules in different laptops to rule out any possible incompatibility issue that might be involved. My conclusion is that all my RAM modules work perfectly fine, but not in my X300. All other IBM/Lenovo machines work fine with them.

The funny thing is that as a matter of last resort I tried several old RAM modules that shipped with my Lenovo machines. And those miraculously work. Is it possible that Lenovo locked my X300 to the kind of chips they use for their own RAM?
I.e. do I need to order Hynix, Samsung, Infineon or even the FRU RAM from Lenovo to upgrade my X300?

If that is the case, this would have been a really lame move by Lenovo.

I also updated my BIOS to v1.05. My X300 is a 6476 CTO model without WWAN.

Maybe someone knows of this strange problem and can offer some advice. I would definitely be grateful!

Best regards,

Ingo

[Supermans]

Lenovo locked the wimax feature where you hado to use their cards so I wouldn't leave that theory out with the memory.. However it would have to be a bios issue if that was the case..

[erik]

I.e. do I need to order Hynix, Samsung, Infineon or even the FRU RAM from Lenovo to upgrade my X300?

no, you don't.   i've used four different brands of memory (crucial, samsung, hynix, and nanya) in various sizes (512MB, 1GB, and 2GB) in my former X300 without issue.

[Brad]

On the X300 I setup there was a 2gb Samsung chip in one slot out of the box and I added another 2gb PQI chip. No issues here.

Brad