What is the maximum amount of memory your notebook can take? How many memory slots does it have?

Last Friday, in the morning of 15th May 2009, my Dell XPS M1330 notebook went berserk… when I switch it on, some colorful vertical lines appears on the screen. Sometimes it switches on without the lines but once the windows fully loaded, sometimes it just freezes, and I have to forcefully witch it off.

I was so mad and sad… the whole Friday I was trying to figure out what is going on with the notebook. I did not read my email the whole day. I used the BIOS diagnostic and it took ages… made worse when I have to attend discussion and meeting that day… while I was away, the diagnostic found a problem on the hard disk and it has to wait for my next instruction! Imagine, the diagnostic have to wait for me like one or two hours… and it happened two times… and it repeats the process all over again after I click continue.

I continue using the notebook with the problem but on Sunday night, it went completely dead. When switched on, the bios not even loaded. The next morning I send it back to the shop and they called Dell support. I got back the notebook on Friday and according to the report, the notebook fan encounters some problem causing the display controller overheating.

I’m forced to use back my old Dell XPS M1210 for a week, but it only has 1GB of RAM coz I’ve moved its memory to other places. I need full 4GB for my work… sometimes I need to load a few Virtual PCs to do my work…

I manage to get 2 pieces of 2GB notebook memory from somewhere… 😀

And to install 2 pieces of memory into Dell XPS M1210, you need to do some tricks. The first slot is at the bottom of the notebook. The second slot is under the keyboard. But to access the second slot, you need to remove the panel cover above the keyboard… you need to push the screen flat to remove the panel. Then you have to remove the keyboard.

Once the memory installed, the BIOS will give warning of the memory size changes… although I’ve done this before which was long time ago… I forgot what to do. I removed the battery again and wait for a while. I even press the Fn while pressing the power button… which I think help where the hidden diagnostic menu came out… not really sure what happened… lazy to recall.

Out of curiosity, I went to Dell website to check if there is any new XPS model… well, I already know about the XPS Studio which I don’t really like 😛

I played with the online notebook customization… and guess what I noticed?

Now you can have up to 8GB of notebook memory!!! Whoooaaaa… that is damm a lot… If you think there is only 3GB on one piece, you are wrong… it is 4GB on one piece!!!
Now you can have two pieces of 4GB making it 8GB for your notebook!!!

But there is a but… since 32bit OS like XP and Vista are limited to 4GB of memory… well you can say 3.5GB… there is no point of getting 8GB… unless you change to 64bit OS.

For academic purpose… here are the maximum memories supported by Vista versions:

32bit Vista:
Home Basic – 4GB
Home Premium – 4GB
Business – 4GB
Enterprise – 4GB
Ultimate  – 4GB

64bit Vista:
Home Basic – 8GB
Home Premium – 16GB
Business – 128GB
Enterprise – 128GB
Ultimate – 128GB

So before you go out wasting your money to buy your notebook memory, although memories are cheap nowadays, do check the maximum memory supported by the operating system first.