Maybe the dumbest RAM question in history!

About 2 seconds, unless you hit Esc.

<font color=green>I post so you don't have to!
9/11 - RIP</font color=green>

in fact, unless you deactivate the quickboot test, it didnt really TEST the memory, just see how many you have. for a complete test, its made 3 times, from byte to byte. took about 7-8 minutes in my dual p3, 768 meg ram CL2

The BIOS tests memory in blocks of 2K. Quick boot only detects memory, apart from testing it once. Disabling quick boot makes BIOS test each and every byte, of course in 2K blocks with a variety of tests like walking 1s and 0s, testing 1 state as well as 0 state etc that would catch the errors in even a single bit of any byte. this test is obviously too slow.

as the amount of memory increases it takes longer to do all these tests. might take a few minutes for old machines while fewer miutes for the latest multi GHz machines.

Its interesting since the memory bus has only increased by four fold in speed and only twice in width since the 486 although the processor speeds have touched a couple of GHz!

girish

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

I still have one in my lab, I am making a museum out of it. Its not a 8088, its a NEC V30 at 4.77 MHz with 640kb of RAM!

I also have a 286/4 MB and a 386/8 MB - both have slightly faster RAM count, faster ticks as if a paper is stuck in you bike's wheel!

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

yes, I was a bit serious about the RAM, you see more the better. I saw it coming!

BTW the 8088 was a Celeron to the 8086! basically it was designed to be used in existing 8 bit designs using the 8085. it was a crippled 8086, with a 4 byte instruction stream as opposed to a longer 6 byte one of the 8086. Cutting L2 is todays's story, it started with cutting the L1 itself!!!

it also had a 8 bit data bus, and one signal differed to be compatible with the 8085.

so I was right about memory but had a lower budget so I settled for a 8088. not even that, a clone V30! copy cats existed even then!

history repeats itself, how very true!

girish

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

I hated history, but this PC history is much more interesting.

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

Well, I got mine a bit too late, just more than a couple of years ago - it was much better than my the system I had dreamt of for years - a K6-II 350 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 4.3 GB Hard disk etc.

I get most of the systems for my museum against upgrades in buyback. The one V30 I was telling about was procured from a old man for 1000 rupees - approx $20! I am looking at another XT with 5MB Hard disk for about the same.

And I recently built my latest system - a Athlon 1.1 GHz working at 1.3 with 256 MB, 40 GB etc. And getting a Asus TUSL-2 soon as soon I get some cash!

girish

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>