Maximum Memory on Dell Dimension 4300 Systems?

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@stoochie wrote:

I currently have 512MBs of SD-RAM on my Dimension 4300 and i want to purchase an additional 512 to bring my total to 1024.  In my Dell manual it says the maximum memory capicity is 512 of SDRAM.  This link  ... crucial.com says that the maximum memory capicity is 1024.  Which one is correct?

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Hi,

You system max is really 1 GB, just like the Crucial page says.
Just input the system number into the RAM picker and you can see you real system specs.
It seems that Dell changed the system specs for the 4300 from 1 GB to 512MB when they discovered that Windows ME whith which the system shipped had a memory bug.
So, instead if installing the simple fix and listed the required information on the system support page, Dell just lowered the spec to save support cost.
You can read about the Windows memory bug in Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and Windows ME, and find the simple fix right here.

Mis Dos Centavos,
Darrell
Helping Dell talkers here since 1997
Memory upgrade information
Find the ...
"How much can my system hold?"
"What kind is it?"
... and other memory information.

Message Edited by Thereal-dbk4297 on 12-15-2002 04:21 PM

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@stoochie wrote:

The real I am confused.

(Oh, and i'm running XP)  So am i able to have 1024MB's of RAM?

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Hi,

That is correct.
Your system can make use of upto 1 GB of memory no matter what version of Windows you are running. You just need to be sure that the memory is correct for your specific system model number like you will find from Crucial using the RAM picker.

Mis Dos Centavos,
Darrell
Helping Dell talkers here since 1997
Memory upgrade information
Find the ...
"How much can my system hold?"
"What kind is it?"
... and other memory information.

The real I am confused.

(Oh, and i'm running XP)  So am i able to have 1024MB's of RAM?

hi! I got a 4300. It's 1 gig. But don't add more than 512mb or you will be wasting your money. The computer does not go any faster if you were to add 1 gb total ram. I went from 256mb to 512mb and noticed little if any at all speed increase in any programs.

No programs need 1gb to run.

hmm nyguy are u sure about that.  Because i am going to have to disagree with you.  Games will run faster, programs will also and the computer in general will run faster.

only if the program needs all of that ram it will run faster. otherwise it will just goto waste. post back when you install it with your results if you can.

I love that this system lets me reply to this message from 12 years ago.

For anyone looking to preserve the usefulness of one of these 4300s, I strongly recommend that you max out your RAM to 1gb, yes, of course.

But beyond that, what's really helped was adding an SSD, and telling Windows to put its swap/cache file on it.

If you can make your C drive an SSD, including the swap file, that's best, but it can be tough finding a card that can allow you to boot off of an SSD.

$70 gets you a Kingston 120GB drive on Amazon right now.  The machine is easily 2-5x faster at everything it does.

Note that Windows XP is ignorant of the nature of SSDs and will treat one as if it were a traditional spindle drive, causing premature wear. For that reason, and that Microsoft is dropping support for XP in under three months, you might consider upgrading to Windows 7. (1gb of RAM is sufficient for Windows 7 32-bit.)

 

 

DIMENSION 4300's can use 1 Gig Max.

Memory Type: ,  (non-ECC) PC133 SDRAM
Maximum Memory: 1GB
Slots: 2

 

Windows 7 is Horrible with only 1 gig of ram.

 

An Optiplex 620 Tower has PCI-E video slot , SATA hard drives AND can take up to 3.5 gigs of ram.

The cost of 2 512 meg PC133 ram chips will be more than a Used GX620 tower WITH windows 7 on Ebay and Amazon.

Windows 7 is Horrible with only 1 gig of ram.

I installed Windows x64 on an E5200 with an old 160gb SATA hard drive and 1gb of RAM and the recipient said it was considerably speedier than what she'd made do with before.

Oh, and I read a tip that you should make sure to format your SSD as NTFS with 4K clusters.  It may require third-party partitioning software, or that you format it using another machine, preferably Win7+ so it knows what to do.

Not knowing this at the time, all I can tell you is both drives are already using 4k clusters, so I guess I was lucky (?).

Another bit of rumor is that some Intel and Samsung SSDs have resident utilities for XP which perform TRIM for you, but apparently Kingstons don't, as of 2012-2013. *shrug*

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments; I thought I was alone with the ghosts of 12 years ago.

I provide my advice for anyone who, like me, has a totally functional machine with all kinds of software, drivers, services set up just so for many years, but would like it to run faster.

Thanks to your comments, I did some research.  IMO, the big reason not to use SSD on XP is that XP doesn't send TRIM commands to the SSD, telling it when to run garbage collection and what can be collected.  The more efficient GC, the faster the drive will operate.  All the decent current drives have automatic GC, but TRIM is more efficient and will allow an SSD to work faster.

These boxes are so slow, I bet the difference is practically beneath the noticeability threshold.  I can tell you I'm running these Kingston SSDs on two XP boxes (the other one is much newer) and they're both 2-5x faster, while still being below the top performance benchmarks the drives advertise.  It isn't absolutely optimal, but it's given new life to the old mail/webserver.

Re: which card?  I am using two Sil3114 based cards.  One is by Rosewill and is at least 5 years old; it will boot on port 0 but won't recognize drives over 500gb or so.  The other is new and recognizes big drives but won't boot.  It is "4 Port SATA RAID to PCI Card Adapter Converter Silicon Image Sil3114 Chipset" by XRP (there was an identical one listed by another company and it is wrong - I had to get a refund).  Don't try to boot a C drive on a 4300S with this one.  Yes, I updated to the "latest" BIOS.

Because of the two cards, I have the SSD, one data drive, and an optical drive hooked to the old card, and my other two (large) data drives hooked to the new card.  It's Frankensteiny, but it works, and I had the free slots.  

There are also IDE-SATA adapters out there which might get the job done without any cards - I have no idea as I haven't used them.  I imagine it is slower, but again these machines are slow enough that it may not make much difference in performance.  

Also, even though the Rosewill card cold-boots fine, it isn't recognized when Windows is restarted - I have to power it down completely.  Hooking up drives using the IDE ports would probably resolve this (and probably save some electricity too).

IMO the biggest advantage of the SSD has been that the box uses virtual memory almost as quickly as RAM, so it's a way of getting over the 1gb limit and running a few server apps at once without noticeable delay when a user visits a website or tries to check email.  Also, though it doesn't boot instantly by any means, it used to take a couple of minutes and now it takes under a minute.

I figured I might as well report on this here, in case it helps anyone.

I tried a PATA(IDE) to SATA adapter instead of a RAID card for the C drive.

It's cheaper and easier, sure, and it warm boots like it's no big deal (which it shouldn't be!  but the RAID card froze up unless the power was cycled... very bad if a power failure outlasts the UPS).

But it appears to be noticeably slower.  

It feels much faster than the old IDE hard drive, still, but using my development MySQL server, for example, seems slower than when C was attached to the RAID card.

Thought it could help someone!