need help figuring out ram weirdness.

[Ashleyyyy]

so i fixed up an old toshiba laptop i've had on a shelf for 3.5 years, and it's having weird ram problems. 

 

this is the exact laptop

 

so, with a 2gb DDR3 1066mhz stick in it it works fine. with 1 or 2 4gb DDR3L 1600mhz stick(s) it boots but bluescreens when it tries to load Windows, and an 8GB DDR3L stick doesn't work at all.

 

i have tried combinations of those but nothing other than the single DDR3 2gb stick works. 

 

so is that a limitation of the device to not accept DDR3L? as far as i'm aware DDR3L is backwards compatible with DDR3... 

 

i need 8gb of ram for the things i plan to do with it, which is the maximum it supports according to the website. what type of ram should i get that has the best chance of working with it? 

[HanZie82]

Lot of notebook manufactererrs do NOT make their motherboard compatible for all RAM. 

Check online to see if others have gone before you and tried. It might just be the one kit thats compatible.

[Jurrunio]

1st gen Core CPUs only support 16.38GB max of RAM, so I assume they still carry the Core 2 thing of only working with older 2Gb memory dies and not 4Gb dies. 8GB sticks of DDR3 use 4Gb dies, 16 of them, so they dont work. Even 4GB sticks can have either 16 2Gb dies, of which it will work, or 8 4Gb dies which doesn't.

 

That BSOD problem is probably dying stick or BIOS running the memory speed at something the memory controller doesnt want to take. Could also be too much of voltage ruining stability of the stick, since 1st gen Core time DDR3L doesn't exist so it treats it like DDR3, shoving 1.5V (up to 1.575v as I've seen some laptops do) into it.

[Ashleyyyy]

33 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

1st gen Core CPUs only support 16.38GB max of RAM, so I assume they still carry the Core 2 thing of only working with older 2Gb memory dies and not 4Gb dies. 8GB sticks of DDR3 use 4Gb dies, 16 of them, so they dont work. Even 4GB sticks can have either 16 2Gb dies, of which it will work, or 8 4Gb dies which doesn't.

interesting. i ordered 2 4gb 1066mhz DDR3 sticks, which si identical to the 2gb stick that's in it now, just double the capacity. i'll see if that works. Toshiba say that the max is 8gb so like.. it's all i need anyway.