identifying PC Simms

[Scott Stevens]

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 19:35:34 -0500
Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:24:05 +0100
> Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > Jeff Walther wrote:
> > > The real trick is figureing out the capacity of the chips from the

> > > markings on them.  Google searches sometimes help, but often
(almost
> 
> > > always) just lead you to chip distributers spamming the search
> engine 
> > > space with part numbers to lead part searches to their sites. 
They 
> > > often don't even have the chip in question, and rarely have any
> useful 
> > > information available on their website.
> > 
> > Usenet archives tend to be better when finding out memory chip 
> > capacities IME - luckily the spammers only seem to concentrate on
the 
> > web side of things.
> > 
> > > I beliee that most PCs could make use of the added parity bit,
while
> 
> >  > Macs didn't care if it was present.
> > 
> > (ignoring attributions here I know)
> > 
> > Isn't that the other way around? Nearly all PCs I've come across
don't
> 
> > care about parity, but the rest of the world always seemed to make
use
> 
> > of it.
> > 
> No, my experience, in the 486 era and earlier, was that on the PC all
> the clone motherboards required 9-bit memory.  The Macintosh ignored
> parity, and I used to know a few Mac enthusiasts who ridiculed the
very
> idea of parity (spending an extra 1/8 of the price, etc etc)
> 
> Pentium and newer systems don't require memory modules.

Yikes.  They don't require _parity_ memory modules.  (at least,
_consumer-grade_ Pentium systems.  My IBM quad PPro Server is fussier.)