Windows 7 - Need Help. Simple RAM, Laptop Question

Hello all. I was helping a relative with their laptop which is over 5 years old and running XP. I had a couple of 1 gig sticks of DDR2 RAM from my laptop I was no longer using so decided to upgrade the 1 512MB stick of RAM already in the laptop.

It seems the laptop only supports a maximum of 1 gig of RAM and only a maximum of 512MB in each slot.

Is it okay to keep 2 1 gig sticks in the laptop even though half of it is not recognised by the motherboard as I don't have any 512MB sticks available? Will it damage the laptop?

Thanks.

I don't think that would work at all, to be honest. If the memory sticks are too large (capacity) for the computer, they usually won't be recognized at all.

Hi, thanks for the reply. The laptop is reading half the memory in each slot so it recognises 512MB of each stick. But will this damage the laptop in any way?

Thanks.

I am surprised it boots, to be honest. I don't think it would do physical damage, but I wouldn't have any faith in the memory being stable.

Ok. Thanks for the reply.

What laptop is it?

512MB/slot seems unusual.

The BIOS sets the addressable limits so it shouldn't matter or damage the PC as long as the voltage is the same. It is a waste of 1GB modules though.

its not 'supported' for some reason, it should not damage it in any way however it might be unstable, so you still have 2gb of memory... your laptop manufacture just doesn't 'support' it/not recommended, i have a desktop that you can add a faster cpu to however it will not show up unless you re flash the bios, it would still run at the faster speed just not show it. maybe you can find a bios that works for you to show the extra memory, if you catch my drift...

It's an old laptop about 5 years old and after cleaning it up it seems to be running OK with the original 512MB RAM installed. Thanks for all the replies.

DRAM densitySize of the chip are measured in megabits (1 megabyte = 8 megabits. For example, 256 Mbit means 32 MB.) Nearly all motherboards only recognize 1 GB modules if they contain 64M×8 chips (low density ). If 128M×4 (high density) 1 GB modules are used, they most likely will not work. The JEDEC standard allows 128M×4 only for slower buffered/registered modules designed specifically for some servers, but some generic manufacturers do not comply.