As far as I know neither HP or Dell use proprietry RAM, they may have done years ago but not as long as I have worked on them. Over the last 12 months or so Dell have even stopped using proprietry Power Supplies.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

Yes.

I know for a fact that generic RAM works in modern dell systems, as I have replaced the ram in a recent Dell with some cheap Kingston ram from newegg and it has been working flawlessly since.

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WANTED:

Schroedinger's Cat

Dead And Alive

Compaq was bad at it, I think all of the major brands stoped using that crap during the Pentium III era.


Also, when trying to find out if your RAM is bad... do some diagnostic work yourself.

Both of these will make a bootable CD to run a memory tester:
http://www.memtest86.com/memtest86-3.4a.iso.zip

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/mtinst.exe

Most motherboards will let you underclock the memory for compatability, most times it will happen automatically.


You can also use this memory selector to find compatable RAM:
http://www.orderingmemory.com/select...asp?bsn=NEWEGG

If you have a Dell and haven't reformatted the drive or anything. Start up with F12 pressed and you will see a hidden hardware diagnostic partition. Boot to it and you get a good suite of diagnostic software , it does extensive Ram tests.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

This thread reminded me I had a case/motherboard/CPU/Memory in boxes in my living room that i never got around to assembling, so I spent the last three evenings, quite a few hours, doing it--I now have a new Linux computer, to replace the old Linux which I partially cannibalized, to supplement the Vista from Dell. The hardest parts were accessing screws and connectors in dark, tight places, and figuring out the jumbled mess of cables in the case that the instruction book never mentioned, but needed to be connected to various places on the motherboard. That, and the motherboard was made in China and the documentation was kind of spotty with misspellings and bad grammar and low-res hard-to-read diagrams. But I got it together eventually, and it works.

It does seem if you're willing to spend the time, building your own system is worthwhile--boots up fast, runs fast, no OED software, it's on there if and only if you put it there (Dell improved greatly, especially getting rid of "sign me up to AOL" that is so easy to accidentally click) but still has a few things pre-installed).

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

You have to remember that I'm using top quality parts - no performance bottlenecks in my baby!

Hard drive throughout was 70% faster than a 2.54 Pentium IV GHz Dell at work. RAM throughput was 90% faster. Computation was much faster, too, as computation is highly dependant on RAM speed. Video performance was more than 300% faster.

And that $1400 machine I was referring to was that same poorer standard Dell.

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WIKIPEDIA and GOOGLE are your friends! But only if you use them.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often, not a very good one at that.

Perception is what happens between the senses and consciousness. Reality is what happened before that. If you think the two are equivalent, you've never heard of Von Claustwicz, Sun Tsu, or street magicians.

Formal Logical Fallacy List

I've been building my own computers since 1987. Yes, all ISA back then. I've found that OED software really slows things down for American computers. Webster's software seems to work better.

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Why do you use MS crapware like Windows Vista anyways?

Because the computer came with it!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

er--OEM! Hey, I know better!, I have a BVD in mathematics!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

So when you give someone a brief overview you know what you're doing?

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.