Alienware memory upgrade problem - help

[mjdart]

Alienware Area-51m M5750 17" 1920X1200
Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 2.16GHz ATI X1900 Radeon
(2) 320GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM Drives RAID 1


Going to Win 7 I relalized 2GB was not enough memory for smooth computing so I ordered (2) Samsung 2GB 2Rx8 PC2 5300S modules for a total of 4GB. They came in today and I installed them, the Alien refused to boot, tried swapping positions - NO BOOT, put my 1GB modules back in no problem booted fine. Tried each of the new modules alone (2GB) and it booted right up no problem with either one. I can't boot with both installed however - any ideas???

Original review:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3206

[James]

Crucial Memory Advisor Link

I'd have to double check what chipset is in that laptop, but generally Crucial is pretty good about reporting factual results. That laptop is maxed at 2GB of RAM (2x1GB SO-DIMMs).

[mjdart]

You are correct about limitiation!

I dug back into the specs on the m5750 and it's only capable of 2GB without a bios update flash. I've had that bios 1.19w for several years, but I read a post where a guy flashed his non-alienware laptop (Amilo Xi1546 same chassis) and it would boot up with the alienware head screen and ask for a bios password. It basically renders the laptop as useless. One other guy did the same thing and Fujitsu charged him $120 to clear the password.

The BIOS is 1.19W and also enables the T7600 processor which was standard on the M5790.

I could try getting it from Alienware if I can remember my Hive Password and Login, as I'm kind of afraid of the bios file I have since I don't know if its the official AW file and has been hacked.

Here's another post dealing with this, and he was successful:

http://www.notebookforums.com/t/2273...grade-to-1-19w

"The information I was having a hard time finding, was how to turn off the stupid "bios password enabled" bit.

That was enabled, but both the supervisor and user passwords were not set. Because of this, I did not have an option to disable the bios password on boot.

I went into the bios, and set a supervisor password (I type in dvorak, so I set it to "AAAAA" as that and the "M" key are the only 2 letters the same from Qwerty and Dvorak)

After I had the supervisor password set, I was able to scroll down and disable the boot password. This is where I think a lot of people run into problems in doing the flash on the Alienware. If it glitches you're screwed.

So, I checked the stability of the system 1 more time, and threw in the bios flash CD I burned in Nero.

I then had to peck out the keys "runme" which sounds easy enough, unless you type in dvorak and have the keys rearranged such as I do lol.

5:30 press return: .....

The BIOS CD ran, and went thru the process with no obvious glitches. It then prompted to restart which I did. Since I had to manually tell the cd to run, I left it in thru the reboot cycle which I didn't NEED to do, but didn't want to take any chances. Once I saw the BIOS flash cd bring me back to the "hey.... type in runme" I had the option to CTRL Alt Del out which I did... taking a moment to remove the disk.

Then... as I feared, the bios password screen came up (the one I had JUST turned off... note to self), so I entered in all these A's... and voila! New splash screen!

Set up the bios again, and turned the bios password thing off again (I think it's default is enabled?) Went in, checked my everest log, and logged back out, back in, and back out again to make sure there were no glitches before I tried the RAM... the whole point of doing all this.

Well... My ubuntu is fine... my windows is fine... and I now sit here happily typing away with my 4 GB of RAM =]

There ya go. Hopefully someone some time from now will come across this and get an answer they were looking for.

Here is my updated Everest report after the update and putting the sticks in:"