I’ll try to keep this simple.
I have a hybrid motherboard. For the most part, it’s your usual intel pentium 166. It’s a hybrid board in that it can take both the old-style 72-pin simms and the new-style sdram dimm’s.
Right now, it has 2 16-meg simms for the memory (making 32 megs total). I’ve picked up a new 64-meg sdram dimm, and I know how to install it, but the thing is that the guy at the computer store said I had to reconfigure the mainboard to do so.
I’ve looked in the bios menu, but it doesn’t really have an option to select whether it’ll access/use simm or sdram dimm memory.
Oddly, I thought the board itself would detect what ram was on it, so I tried removing the simms and plugging in the sdram dimm. When I boot it up and check the bios menu, it states that the board has 16-megs of ram (which is really odd, since the sdram dimm is actually a 64-meg chunk of memory).
A friend of mine told me I’d probably have to alter the dip-switches or pins on the mainboard itself. Problem is that other that I don’t know what brand mainboard it is. (There’s no labels saying if it’s AMD, Ameritrends, IBM, whatever). So before I go playing with anything, I’d like to know if there’s a free program I can download from somewhere that will identify the mainboard. Once I know the make & model, I’ll be able to look up the configuration manual on that particular brands web-site).
So I guess my question is a two-parter.
1) can I use both the 72-pin simm andsdram dimm slots at the same time? If yes, what bios or board changes do I need to make? If no, see question 2.
2) How do I get the mainboard to properly recognize that the ram on it is a 64-meg sdram dimm? (I know it’s a 64-meg sdram dimm because I bought it at a computer store and it says so right on the chip-card itself)