upgrade bios

[schiehallion]

does anyone know if its possible to download a bios upgrade for a sony laptop, i have a 1 gig ram and wanted to up grade my ram
i took it to pc world today and they said i could upgrade to 4 gig ram but they never had the chips instore they recommended a local shop to buy the gear and said they (pc world) would fit for me due to fact that i have support contract with them. so i bought the kit then took to pc world to fit when fitted they found my bios would only operate with a max of 3 gig. as my original was 2 x 500 mbs and i only have 2 slots that meant i could only fit 1x 2 gig and 1 x 500 mb leaving me with a brand new 2 gig doing nothing pc world tech guy said i should be able to download a bios upgrade from sony increasing my bios to 4 gig so i can fit my chip but i cant seem to find the page on sony site is the tech guy pulling my plonker ??

[ChuckFickens]

what version of windows do you use?

It's very unlikely you will spot any difference in going up from 3 to 4 gig, in fact it might might things slower (more memory to address takes longer)

Also unless you have a very modern 64bit version of windows then it won't use more than 3.5gb (give or take a little due to some being allocated for other things!)

[ChuckFickens]

oh sorry misread your question..

I still wouldn't do it 2.5gb is also plenty, can you not return or sell the spare ram you have?

it really won't make that much difference upgrading from 2.5 and I don't like flashing bios's unless really necessary

[ACtheTROLL]

oh god ... PC world strike again

there is nothing wrong with your machine ... what you describe is perfectly normal.

32 bit windows will indeed support 4Gb of MEMORY...
unfortunately ... this isn't just ram ... it's every scrap of memory fitted to the machine ...
video PnP info, sound card ... if it's got memory in it ... it's subtracted from the ram total.

chuck is on the money
if you want the techie detail
http://blogs.msdn.com/hiltonl/archive/2007/04/ 13/the-3gb-not-4gb-ram-problem.aspx

[eastern]

Trouble is you might flash the bios and screw up the machine. I'm not being critical here but it does seem you don't know a great deal about pc's, and by that I mean bios, hardware etc. The one secret with RAM is dont mix odd ram sticks, always put in 2 of the same ie 2 x kingston 1gb 5200 speed or whatever, persoanlly I would stick in 2 x 1gb and save all the hassel of possibly corrupting your windows install, which by the way I very much doubt PC World will cover. There is an old computer proverb which I always used in my shop, "If it aint broke don't fix it". I promise you, you will not notice any difference between 2 and 4 gb apart from the cost of buying it!!! PC world are great at selling things but then I'm afraid it's a visit to your local PC shop.

[VHG]

Unless you are doing compute intensive work you would probably not notice much difference between having 1Gb and 2Gb, let alone having 3Gb or 4Gb.

[fo3nix]

AC etc. are all correct; it won't do 4GB anyway.

One other thing to think about: you get better performance with a matched pair, due to the bus being dual.

So you are probably best with 2x1GB.

[schiehallion]

thank you everybody for your input, i think i will go with the general consensus and leave flashing my bios well alone.
cheers everyone/
john