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

[(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.