Memory loss.

[elfs]

This morning, while hacking away at my laptop, I had the strangest realization: half the memory was missing. Instead of the 128K, it reported having only 64K. What's more annoying, when I rebooted the BIOS reported the same thing. After powering down and removing all peripherals, I cold-booted and all the memory came back.

So now I know: never cold-boot with a PC card in. That seems to be the trigger that makes the memory disappear. Why this should be, I have no clue. But I can consistently make this happen on my Thinkpad 600E, which annoys me no end. Another-work around seated in physical habits. I can't stand those.

Comments

Was it one specific PC card, or any at all?

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

It may be the 'triggering' PC cards all share a common feature: They have a built-in BIOS extender that the laptop's being asked to load on boot, either errounously or really believing it needs it at boot-time instead of letting the system itself handle it later.

If it's only one specific card, it may well be it's just 'following spec' and handing whatever it's plugged into code to access it properly, much like SCSI cards will do to let DOS work with them.

[fallenpegasus]

One of the memory slots in my TP went bad on me. I whenever I would coldboot or come back from hibernation, I would have to carefully watch the BIOS memory display, and if it was wrong, shut down the boot, open the door to the memory slots, pull the memory, reinsert it, and reboot again.

Finally I gave up. An extra 64MB wasn't worth the aggrivation and wear.

Buh, yeah... after reading this post... I feel a bit silly. :-)

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

I was taking Elf's comments at face value about K, not mentally double-checking if it should be M. If it was a laptop with 128K of memory, well, losing 64K to a PC card is quite easy with the BIOS-extenders. If it's 64M... that's pointin' at failing chips somewhere along the line.

Re: Buh, yeah... after reading this post... I feel a bit silly. :-)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It was megabytes, not kilobytes. My fault. Yeah, basically about half my memory disappeared.

I hope it's nothing too serious. I love this little thing. It's lasted me a good year plus so far. It's never given me a bad day. I've been giving it a harder workout recently, thanks to having better internet access and plenty of on-line music and stuff to download.

Hey, Mark, what did you do to get it to behave? Seattle Laptop, or just cram a 128MB card into the good slot?

Re: Buh, yeah... after reading this post... I feel a bit silly. :-)

[riverheart.livejournal.com]

Talk to jassad, who works at Seattle Laptop, and is my water brother...

[(Anonymous)]

Are you sure this is a PCMCIA card thing ? I had a similar problem on a Thinkpad 560E which turned out to be totally unrelated to the PCMCIA cards. (it turned out a combination of rough handling and age had created dubious contacts on the memory module. Half hour re-seating the laptop motherboard and cleaning the contacts (I recommend a soft pencil eraser rubbed over the contacts till there shiny again, followed by a keyboard vacuum to remove the bits of eraser) and its now working fine regardless of pcmcia slots). Additionally if you use some of the more exotic bits of tpctl (linux thinkpad apm control package) they don't always seem to match up with the bios and you can end up badly confusing some fairly core hardware.

Hope that lot wasn't obvious and / or irrelevant.