HP pavilion probs

HI guys I'm new here, so please be gentle with me.

We have our workhorse ( Dell PC runs fine) BUT, our " stand by" is a HP pavilion... Zd7010ea.. Yeah yeah I know it's old... but hardly ever used.

A couple of moths ago it decided to run at a snails pace. A colleague of my husbands said to buy some new memory. The lappy had 2 x 256MB, we purchased 2x 1GB.
Here's where the probs start, can't change the speed in the bios, so it runs at 133 instead of 366.

I phoned HP, their tech guy said it would not work because it's not compatible with the MB. Yet, the manual says the RAM will work with all models ..... backwardly compatible.

Any suggestions please.... maybe that wasn't a good question lol
Lynn

 

may be motherboard can only support 133

on what manual did you look on the ram or the computer

 

Hi. hubby said it was in the manual that came with the lappy.

 

if there are to different rams. the slower speed will be reconized

also with older mobo, the more ram you put in the slower the speed is y (i dont know)
my suggestion is to check the ram speed by placing new ram in separately, and the old ones(mix and match to see if you differents speed)

update your bios and

what is the ram that you bought

 

OK will check one at a time and mix them.

OK now the fun starts.... the bios won't allow any changes apart from date and time, everything else is grey.
We had heard that HP lock the Bois so users may not upgrade as they wish to.
RAM speed has been checked...( with CPUID)- it's 166

The RAM that was purchased is.... 2 x 1 GB PC 2700 333.

Thanks
Lynn

 

it sure is fun to mess with computers

hp is hasa very very boring bios indeed that yy im selling my hp and gettinhg a better on

 

The 333MHz RAM should downclock to run at 166MHz. Is the BIOS locked with a password by any chance? Just throwing this out there as a possibility.

 

Hey Bog, thanks for your reply.

Nope the Bios isn't protected with a password, it' just won't highlight

Hubby can get into the BIOS on the Dell with no probs, but not on the HP

 

OK fellas her specs say 266. 133X2(DDR)=266? You can't make it run faster. The MoBo and system/memory bus determine the fastest the RAM can run not the RAM itself. It runs as PC2100 not PC2700, that is just the way it is locked BIOS or not.

 

So will a new MoBo help? if yes, can you recommend what to purchase?
Thanks
Lynn

 

You will not be able to purchase a newer motherboard for your system.
Have you restarted the computer, cause when you upgrade the memory, windows has to adjust the pagefile size, to 1.5x the memory amount. This can take some time on older machines, particularly if the harddrive is slow.
After a restart, the machine should run a bit faster.
If not, than go into task manager, and see if their is a process which is eating up your ram/cpu/harddrive.

As powerpack mentioned, running memory at slower than standard speeds is fine.
I have 2 Gb of Pc3200 400mhz memory in my dell 8500, which only supports pc2100, so the memory clocks down to 266Mhz, or 133 x 2, and then the cas latency drops from 3-3-3-8 to 2-2-2-4.

K-TRON