I received a free notebook from work and want to try and fix it up. It has defective memory, but this memory is actually built onto the logic board. It is a Gateway notebook with a Pentium M (Centrino) CPU and the intel 885GM Chipset.
http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/Gateway/3000Series/4995sp3.shtml
Those are the specs of the machine I have. Everything else works great on this notebook. It's a shame this design flaw exists.
I know for a fact that it's not worth trying to get someone to remove the old RAM and replace it. But, can the RAM be removed and use the extra expansion slot instead?
The root question being, is the onboard ram seen as a socket or as simple "built-in"? If I remove the faulty chips, will it refuse to boot or will it accept the other ram stick? Or maybe I can somehow disable one chip at a time by some form of wiring to see which one is bad then just remove that single chip.
Shot in the dark.....
Btw, even if my idea doesn't work, I can always use the BadRAM patch for Linux to try and get this thing working with Ubuntu.
Before going through the effort and risk of chip removal, you could just disable the onboard ram by lifting the two or three pins supplying power to each chip.
You'll need to track down the pinouts, of course, but googling for the ram should provide that.
IIRC, from the Atari ST memory upgrading I did, the built-in ram will be treated as a complete bank, and you'd need to disable all of it rather than a single chip.
I am just about to tackle the same problem with another of these laptops with faulty memory....
it is hynix memory in this one is yours the same?