Memory Upgrade advice… please help

Hi people

I have 17 elonex pc’s that are running cele’s 833mhz (or something similar) they have 128 meg of ram I presume pc133 ? is there a way I can check without opening up the pc’s? I need to upgrade the memory on all of them to 512 so they can run win xp (very slowly!) they will be used as network clients and apparently will work ok with a mem upgrade! Anyway that’s what I need to do take em upto 512… shall I go for cheep generic ram or get some good stuff.. Also having two slots in each machine I presume I will have to take out the 128 stick and just buy 17 x 512?

Please could anyone add any advice in regards to the above, all comments will be useful! Apart from…. They will struggle with winXP… which I have already told the powers that be!

Well, you could always download a copy of SiS Sandra, you can download it free from http://www.sisoftware.co.uk
You can run al kinds of benchmarks for your machine, include a memory one which will tell you what speed they are running at.
If you know your not going to be upgrading your machines again (e.g. another upgrade to 1Gb in 6 months or so) you should get 2 sticks of 256 for each machine because the more dense the module, the more likley hood of errors.e.g. a stick of 1gb would be twice as likley to have errors or fail than a stick of 512. Another advantage of having 2 sticks of RAM is that you would have a "backup" module just incase one failed.
Hope that helps

You want to get basic branded memory - Crucial is best...

http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/Part...4S4D75&cat=RAM

I don't think they'll struggle too bad with XP. My parents PC is a PII 350Mhz with 364Mb RAM and XP runs fine.

Crucial is pretty reliable, and kingston has some pretty good PC133 in their ValuRAM lineup. You really might not need 512mb of ram in each system, as windows uses about 100mb for its virtual memory and stabilty functions. Unless you really feel the need, I'd just buy 17 256mb sticks and plop em in. It's a good idea to at least open one, however, and check the maker of the original ram, so you can reduce compatibility issues.

thanks guys! so 133 ram will work even if the other stuff is 100? or am i being silly again?

All the RAM in the computer will run at the speed of the slowest stick. e.g. if you have 3 sticks, PC100, PC133, and PC133 they will all run at PC100 speeds...unless ofcourse you overclock them a little.....

ok i thought that was the case, thank you, after some of my muck up's it's good to check these simple things!