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January 8th, 2017 02:00
Inspiron 530s: Maximum RAM
I had odd problems running 8GB in this machine, and have reverted back to 4GB without these problems. This PC has a Pentium Dual E2180 processor, 4 RAM slots, and BIOS is 1.0.18. The original OS is Vista-32. Here's what happened:
At 4GB: Fresh install of Windows 7 64-bit - no problems.
Installed 8GB RAM: No obvious problems (8GB indicated in BIOS and Windows 7). However, my wife (her computer) began installing her previous Big Fish games and encountered errors with most of them ("failed to write to memory xxx"). Everything else appeared to work normally, although the PC seemed a bit slow. After working with Big Fish support, no solution was found.
Fresh install Vista-64: Just before its first restart, error window appeared "Windows setup could not configure Windows to run on this computer's hardware".
Fresh install Vista-32: Same Windows setup error as above.
Fresh install XP-32: Same Windows setup error as above.
Installed 4GB RAM: Fresh install XP-32 normally. Big Fish games installed without problems.
Even though the problems occurred only with Big Fish games (other applications installed without error), I can only conclude that there was some addressing issue with the memory controller/CPU. I also noticed that copying files from a USB memory stick took about twice as long as normal.
At the moment, the 4GB PC is running well with XP, and it would run OK with Vista or Windows 7, 32 or 64-bit OS. Windows install objected to something with the 8GB motherboard, although Windows didn't object to the 4->8GB upgrade after Windows was installed at 4GB. Funny, that.
RoHe
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January 8th, 2017 14:00
Dell doesn't support Win 7 on this PC so what -if any- drivers did you load? And do you have a valid Microsoft license to run Win 7 or any other OS on this PC, aside from the version originally installed by Dell?
And according to the specs in the manual, the 530s has a max RAM of 4 GB. Note: Inspiron 530sa/530sc have a max of 8 GB
danhutch
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January 8th, 2017 16:00
Only the audio driver was not provided by Windows 7; for that, the Vista-64 audio driver worked. As for the licenses, I purchased Windows 7 and had an unused XP license.
I don't disagree with you that 8GB is not supported on most 530s computers. I only wanted to make clear to a lot of 530s owners that, even if 8GB appears to be accepted, they might not assume that it will function correctly.