New SDRAM not recognised. any thoughts on reason and solution?

Hey,

a friend has just told me that he's tried installing a new stick of 128mb SDRAM into his pc and it's not recognising it as being there. i said i'd ask for suggestions as to the reason. i'm pretty new at this myself (still haven't got around to putting my first build together yet) but i always thought ram was basically plug and play, surely he can't have exceeded his mobo's limit with 192mb, or could it be carp ram. only thing i could think of, after hearing it on here somewhere i think, was too swap the ram postions around so that when the pc goes looking for a p=stick of 32mb it finds 128mb and is forced to take notice. he's gonna try that now, any other suggestions?

here's what i know,

fairly old machine
3 ram slots, 2 being used by 2 32mb sticks of SDRAM
new stick was bought off ebay

Is it a Single sided DIMM? A lot of old boards don't like those...

as rythmic said if its a single sided the board probably wont like it

you could try removing the 32mb sitcks and just try the 128 on its own in both slots 1 and 2

thanks for the reply, i have no idea, he was talking to me on msn at the time when he said about it, so haven't actually seen it, he said he'd try swapping them around and phone me if that didnt work. he hasn't phoned yet so it may have worked. i'm seeing him tomorrow morning as he's going out looking for a new laptop, so if it's still not working i'll check if it's single sided. thanks anyway.

don't suppose anyone's seen any great bargain laptops about recently that they'd recommend? would save us some leg work. hahaha, only kidding, i'm sure we'll be fine.

just thought i'd say thanks guys, it was because it was single sided and not double sided like the 2 32mb sticks, he tried it in on it's own and it wouldnt boot, just tried it in one of my pcs that was using single sided and it worked straight away. thanks again.