O.T.
Gahh, who knew that you couldn’t just buy any old PC-2700 DDR-333 unbuffered, non-ecc memory to upgrade an old Dell Dimension 3000?

The part I was sweating which was upgrading the CPU from a 2.4Ghz to a 3.4Ghz P4 went perfectly. Then I tried to step the memory up from a single 512Mb card to two 1Gb cards, and all I could get was an error beep code.

I robbed two 512Mb cards from an old HP I have here and they worked fine, and both new 1Gb cards work fine in the HP. I had a deadline to return the computer so I took it back with only 1Gb of physical memory installed (it had 512Mb before).

Now that I had time to look up what the problem is I discovered that the Intel “bridge” chipsets on the motherboard will not recognize high density memory chips. Nothing above 64Mb per Dram chip while the memory I was sold uses 128Mb “high density” chips.

Fuck you Intel, really WTF? Why do VIA and SIS chipsets from the same time period recognize high density memory but your chipsets wont?

Sigh…sorry, I just haven’t had the misfortune of running into this particular stupidity before. :(