Old MoBo More RAM?

[Stretch32]

After much thought I've decided not to give up on my old desktop, at least for the moment, and to try and keep it going another 6 months to a year (waitng for the lastest flightsim specs before building the new one). I've looked around at various inexpensive (spelled C-H-E-A-P) upgrades to get me along that far. After some review I've decided I'll just go ahead and throw in a new vidcard and PSU and possibly some RAM (looks like maybe $200 overall).

My question is whether or not I can put in more RAM or not. I have an old Compaq 6370US (P4 2.53Ghz) desktop and I can't seem to find what MoBo is actually in it. After some searching it seems 1 gig of RAM is the max that was originally supported. I've heard of others putting more RAM in older computers so I thought it may be possible to do so with mine.

I don't know if max RAM is a funtion of MoBo BIOS (which could possibly be editted?) or maybe when the computer was new (2001-02) it was all XP supported. Any thoughts on this? Is it possible the MoBo might recognize more than the current 1 gig without any changes other putting it in? I have XP Home+SP2 on it for an OS and have never seen/messed with th BIOS on the MoBo.

Any help would be great. Thanks in advance.

Stretch

 

[rabidbunny]

I do not think that putting in more than 1gb will help much. I too have an older system (from early 2003) that has a max of 1gb. It recognizes more than 1gb, but i'm not sure if it uses all 1.25 gb. It really depends on what you use the rig for anyways.

My gaming desktop on xp has 2gb of memory and I have only seen some of the recent games using over 1gb of memory. In that case it is paged to the hard drive, so it's not that big of a deal.

plus, i wouldn't put any more money into that system since it's soo old that you're better off saving up for a new rig.

I luv old rigs. They still chug along!
I don't think i'll ever get rid of my old one until something dies in it! (right now it's an email machine at home).

 

[Stretch32]

I use it to play flightsims occasionally and check email at the moment. Really I'm not a "gamer" so much and the sims I play don't use the newest graphics engines like FlightsimX (IL2/Pacific Fighters, Lockon and Wings Over Vietnam). Lately though, with all the latest patches and upgrades installed, the loading times for these sims has gotten fairly long. I figured a bit more RAM could help this as well as smooth out gameplay a little more. These games are far from graphics intensive like Crysis or CoD4 from what I've seen so crazy upgrades are not needed to get by at very high/max graphics settings.

Stretch