Josh
Rolla,#2Consumer Suggestion
Tue, March 29, 2005
CL2.5 and CL3 will work fine together. Go into the bios and set the CAS latency to 3. CAS3 is slightly slower and the laptop is probably set to CAS2.5. You may also want to try swapping the two memory modules, sometimes the motherboard only reads the SPD chip of one of the modules. Also, RAM almost never goes bad by itself. Chances are good that it got zapped by static electricity when you replaced the graphics card. To be safe, use a grounding wrist strap next time you disassemble the laptop.
Christopher
Pittsburg,#3Author of original report
Tue, March 29, 2005
In December I gave up following Alienware's troubleshooting procedures and just did it myself and found out I had a malfunctioning memory stick. It would pass diagnostics sometimes but not others, so I pulled it out and low and behold my system worked fine, but with only half its memory. I contacted Alienware and after going through all the motions yet again, they agreed to ship me new RAM. All was good again - or so I thought. Fast forward to March. Yes, it took them THREE MONTHS to ship me my warranted memory. Something BS about a "Backorder" status. I get the RAM and notice its inferior to my old RAM, as it uses CL3 timing and my old ram and still-installed stick use CL2.5 timing. I pop it in, and my motherboard can't deal with the different timing and refuses to boot. After three months of waiting, I was sent an incompatable replacement. While I'm happy it at least works reliably now, my current favorite game (World of Warcraft) is *extremely* RAM hungry and the difference in performance between 1 GB and 512 MB is quite extreme. I plan on replacing this sytem within the next year - so far I think it's an even bet if it will *ever* work at 100%. This company's service is so lousy it's starting to remind me of the bad old Packard Bell days. If they don't improve I really don't see how they can stay in business.