[paulgj]

Originally Posted by brynden29

So I got the DIMM. I put it in the Mini, and nothing. The light turned on and nothing happened. I put it in my XPS laptop and it showed up in the bios. It does say that it is 667 mhz and I know the MINI uses 533, should it downclock it? Or did I buy the wrong memory?

Anyways, it looks like the 4gb DIMM I bougth does not work in the MINI.

I concur with brynden29, I just borrowed a 4GB G.Skill DDR2-667 module from my ThinkPad T61 and had exactly the same result. Light comes on but otherwise nothing happens, not even the Dell startup logo. Everything back to normal once I put the 2GB module back in.

[seniorusn]

Just curious which version BIOS you are running.....are you running A03????

[UnaClocker]

This thread should have died with one reply. "No." No way, no how.

[paulgj]

Originally Posted by seniorusn

Just curious which version BIOS you are running.....are you running A03????

Yes, A03 - it's in my sig line.

[2-J]

It's a hardware limitation, I remember reading. A bios update can't fix it.

[Dreizehn]

Originally Posted by Drewmangroup

Because this thread is almost dead. If, hypothetically, you could out 4 gigs of RAM in there. How awesome would it be if you had the 4 gig version of the Mini 9 to have it copy the SSD drive into RAM on startup. Of course it would take a while but think how fast it would be! And then on shutdown dump the RAM back into the SSD.

And, gosh, with 64 bit processors, theoretically they can address 16 exabytes of RAM, which is crazy. While we may never get to that point, I could see it getting pretty crazy in the coming years. The Mac Pro can already address up to 32 gigs of ram!

from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit

The emergence of the 64-bit architecture effectively increases the memory ceiling to 264 addresses, equivalent to approximately 17.2 billion gigabytes, 16.8 million terabytes, or 16 exabytes of RAM. To put this in perspective, in the days when 4 MB of main memory was commonplace, the maximum memory ceiling of 232 addresses was about 1,000 times larger than typical memory configurations. Today, when over 2 GB of main memory is common, the ceiling of 264 addresses is about ten trillion times larger, i.e., ten billion times more headroom than the 232 case

With 64 bit processors, we get to 16 exabytes of RAM. It all depends on the OS to recognize and use it all.

[jefito]

Originally Posted by Dreizehn

With 64 bit processors, we get to 16 exabytes of RAM. It all depends on the OS to recognize and use it all.

The OS *and* the CPU architecture. If the system architecture doesn't support the use of all of those address bits, then you'll have a smaller upper limit on addresses. Think the Motorola 68K CPUs -- as I recall, the 68000 only supported 24 address bits of its 32-bit word size; later versions supported them all.

~jeff

[holmes4]

I think that at present, the "x64" processors support at most 48 bits of physical memory addressing.

[rockydog007]

I have a Inspiron mini and I tried to install 4GB of memory. After the install the unit would not boot back up...I had to reinstall the 1GB.....Do we have to change the bios? I am disapointed in this unit.

[2-J]

^ as has been discussed above, a bios update cannot fix this issue. The chipset cannot support more than 2Gb. It's a hardware limitation.

On the upside, it's been said that with the mini's processor and graphics etc, you probably would hardly notice a difference between 2Gb Ram and 4Gb Ram, (if 4Gb were possible). It is very much worth upgrading to 2Gb if you can though, I can speak from experience there.