I have an eMachines E527-2537 laptop which I picked up on an Amazon lightning deal, and two of my friends have identical laptops as well. The unit specifications say that a maximum of 4GB of RAM is supported, but I’ve seen some situations where those specifications weren’t accurate and higher amounts of memory can be taken. I replaced the 2GB with 8GB (2x 4GB DDR3) to see what would happen. The system recognizes the RAM, but a very odd thing happened…
Apparently, installing more than 4GB of RAM causes the processor to run at the speed of a 486!
While everything seems to function properly, it does so at an unusable speed. So, apparently an Intel Celeron 900 system doesn’t tolerate more than 4GB being installed. Even one 4GB stick works as long as the second slot isn’t populated, so it’s a capacity limit rather than a per-DIMM size limit.
Hopefully this helps someone who runs into the same weirdness!
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I upgraded my E527 twice, from the factory 2GB (2 * 1 GB) to 4 GB (2 * 2GB 1333MHz), and then got greedy and tried to upgrade to 6GB (4GB 1066MHz + 2GB 1333MHz), even though I know it’s listed only for 4GB max. With 6GB, my laptop wouldn’t boot (either to Windows or Ubuntu Linux), but the new 4GB and one of the old 1GB SODIMMs did work fine for me, so as a consolation prize I’m up to 5GB RAM for my laptop.
I don’t think it’s the Celeron 900 that the’s problem, rather it’s the brand of Intel chipset eMachines uses (GL40) that has the 4GB limit: http://ark.intel.com/products/chipsets/35507. I also bought a new CPU for the laptop (T8300), haven’t installed it yet so not sure how it will go but from searching the ‘Net some others have mentioned having a lot of success with it.
The GL40 chipset does only support the 4GB of memory and it’s not a software thing, it’s the memory bus. Processor-wise, it only takes up to 800MHz FSB processors so a Celeron dual core, T3000-3100-3300 is fine, so is the Pentium dual core T4200-4300-4400-4500, also most Core 2 Duo in Socket P Penryn like T6500-6570-6600-6670-8100-8300-9300-9500 and there are also some Socket P Merom in the T7xxx range that work well like T7250-7300-7500-7700-7800.
Personally I don’t feel the extra cost of the higher-frequency T7800 ($70 on eBay) or T9300/T9500 ($70-$100 on eBay) are worth it. A T8300 (2.4GHz) or T4500 (2.3GHz) can be purchased off eBay for $35 or less shipped and will give all the speed you need. The T9300-T9500 do have 6MB L2 cache but the cheaper T8300 has 3MB if you need that sort of processing, I’d pick it over my T4300 (1MB L2) in my Acer 5230E if I had to do it over again. Honestly it’s as fast as I could want a laptop to be short of running GTA IV on it. That’s why I have Vice City and San Andreas, they run fine on my laptop. And when I run Ubuntu 10.10 (EOL soon, waiting for 12.04 LTS when it comes out this month), I don’t have issues there either. You can buy the T4300’s for like $8 shipped right now. I’m stockpiling T3000-T4200-T4300-T8100 and similar AMD chips now (4050e-4450e-TK57-TL56-TL60) so I can buy up cheap slow laptops for $50-$100 and upgrade them and resell for $200-$250.
Lol, I ran into this today while refurbishing an old Acer laptop with GL40 chipset. The CPU is a Pentium T4500.
I saw the DDR3 and though OK! Easy upgrade, let’s put 6GB.. But after reloading the OS, CPU was maxed out on everything… even basic Windows services. After a lot of wasted time, I realized it was a limitation on the chipset. Weirdly, the system POSTed fine, memory diagnostics were ok, and Windows recognized all the memory. With 4GB RAM, it runs quite well.
looking to upgrade to 2×2 or 4gb memory what will fit.
thanks
Any DDR3 2GB stick should work.
Thanks ..can you list the full ddr3 specs. any manufacture ok.
I’m not sure what you want to know. I don’t own the computer anymore though. If you search for the computer model with the words “memory upgrade” you should get a list of vendors that will tell you what the upgrade options are.