• Home
• About Us
• Our Services
• Contact Us

• Web Design & Hosting
• Photography
• Computer Repairs
• Tech Articles
• My Account

Installing 4GB of Memory (RAM) into an Acer Aspire 9300 laptop computer

by Paul Freeman-Powell

What to do if your Acer Aspire 9300 laptop won't POST, turn on or boot up after upgrading to 4GB RAM

A couple of days ago, I ran into a strange problem when upgrading the RAM on a laptop running the 64-bit edition of Windows 7. One of the main advantages of 64-bit computing is that it allows you to use more system memory, and since the Acer Aspire 9300's motherboard will support up to 4GB RAM, it made sense to go for the upgrade as this will see a significant performance boost. In fact, with the 64-bit edition of Windows 7, 4GB is the minimum amount of RAM that we would advise using.

The Acer Aspire 9300's motherboard uses DDR2 PC-5300 memory, and the setup before the upgrade was two sticks of RAM at 1GB each, totalling 2GB. Therefore, for the upgrade two new 2GB sticks were bought to completely replace the old sticks which can be sold on second hand (after testing with Memtest86) or used for spares.

The problem

So, after the new memory had arrived and the old memory had been tested before its resale, I shut down the laptop and removed the old memory and installed the new. (Make sure you follow the appropriate precuations whenever opening up a computer or installing new hardware.) Installing new memory is usually a very simple and straightforward process - you just install the new memory, and usually it will get recognised by the system's BIOS straight away, sometimes with you having to press F1 or F2 etc. to save the new settings the first time the computer boots.

However, when I flipped over the laptop and turn it on... nothing.

The power button lit up, as did the hard disk activity indicator, but there was no sign of the comptuer having any intention of booting up and there was no display at all on the screen.

It's important to note at this point that this fault was nothing whatsoever to do with the operating system and whether or not it was 32-bit or 64-bit etc., as this fault was occurring way before the computer would get anywhere near attempting to start the operating system that was installed.

Troubleshooting

Firstly, I double-checked and then triple-checked the motherboard manual and specification to confirm that it would definitely take the 4GB of RAM and I hadn't made some embarrasing mistake. Honour intact, I confirmed that the laptop should be able to handle 4GB of memory without problems.

So, I took out the new RAM and put back in the old RAM so that I could get into the BIOS setup and check that there wasn't some strange setting that would enable the extra memory. There was nothing I could find, so I made a note of the BIOS version (v1.19) and headed to the Acer support pages to look for an update to the BIOS which might solve my issue.

Thankfully, I found an update (v1.20) so I presumed this would contain a fix for the bug which was causing the laptop to fail to POST after installing the extra RAM. Optimistically, I re-upgraded the RAM on the laptop to 4GB and.... again, nothing.

This was starting to get annoying, so I began to rack my brains for a solution, and began to think along the lines of dual-channel functionality of the memory. It was a long shot, but I decided to test how it worked in single-channel with non-matching pairs, so I took out one of the 2GB sticks and replaced it with a 1GB stick, so I now had 3GB of RAM running in single-channel. This worked fine!

I couldn't find a way in the BIOS to force the motherboard to run the RAM in single-channel if a matching pair was installed, as I wanted to try the 2x2GB sticks in single-channel if I could, but then after much searching around the internet for a solution, I found something which led me to find the solution.

The solution

I read a quote from someone who had been discussing a much older BIOS update for the Acer Aspire 9300 where in a previous version they had fixed a bug which meant that the laptop would not POST with 4GB of RAM installed. Well, to me it appeared that this bug had re-appeared somewhere between that version and versions 1.19 and 1.20 which I had tried!

Luckily, Acer keep some older versions of their BIOS available on their web site for download, so I headed to the support page and downloaded the version closest to the one mentioned in the forum (I'm afraid I didn't keep a link to the forum so can't give them the credit that's due to them, sorry guys!)

After I had downgraded the BIOS to version 1.14 the laptop accepted the 4GB RAM with no problems at all and has worked great since!

A problem with the solution! Open flash.sys Fail

Now, the Acer Aspire 9300 laptop is quite an old model, so although it can run it brilliantly, it wasn't designed with Windows 7 64-bit in mind, so Acer's support pages and some of the utilities don't quite work with it. I found that when I upgraded the RAM to v1.20 and when I downgraded I was unable to do this from within Windows 7, and I kept getting this message:

Open flash.sys Fail - error message when upgrading BIOS on Acer Aspire 9300 using Windows 7 64-bit

I tried running it as an administrator, and running it in compatibility mode for Windows Vista and Windows XP but neither of this worked. I therefore had to run it from a different operating system. Luckily, I had a spare 2.5" SATA hard drive knocking around so I shut down the laptop, swapped the hard drives around and installed Vista onto the new hard drive for the purposes of upgrading (and later, downgrading) the BIOS.

Once I'd installed Windows Vista (you don't need to enter a product key as you're given 30 days' grace - in this case, we only need about 10 minutes!) I then tried to run the BIOS flasher programme again, but still got the same message! Even within Windows Vista, I had to tell it to run as an Administrator and to run it in compatibility mode for Windows XP (Service Pack 3) as in the image below:

Run the flasher utility in Compatibility Mode for Windows XP (Service Pack 3) and make sure "Run this program as an administrator" is ticked.

To recap, to get this to work you need to download the older BIOS version for Acer Aspire 9300 and then unzip the folder you downloaded. I downloaded v1.14 and this worked for me and got the 4GB of RAM working. Inside the first folder is another folder called Winflash - it's in here that you'll find MAM114.EXE which will let you downgrade the BIOS.

As an alternative to running it in compatibility mode for Windows XP, you could of course install Windows XP instead of Windows Vista for the purposes of downgrading the BIOS to get the 4GB of RAM to work in the laptop and POST. However, since I'd already installed Vista it was easier to run in compatibility mode!

Final words...

At this point I must reiterate the disclaimer at the bottom of the article, and stress that this is simply an account of the steps I took to overcome the problem in this instance, and that I took full responsibility for any risk of permanent hardware failure or damage as a result of my actions. The information provided here is for interest ONLY and you follow any tips or advice ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK. Upgrading or downgrading the BIOS on a system is ALWAYS risky - make sure it's powered from the mains (as well as battery if it's a laptop) and ensure that nothing could interrupt the power supply during the flashing process, otherwise you'll have yourself a very large and expensive paper weight in the space that used to be your computer. You should consider using a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) whenever performing such actions, and should always take precautions to protect your computer equipment against static whenever you open it up to add or upgrade hardware. No responsibility whatsoever can be taken for any circumstances which arise as a result of you following advice given in this article. You have hereby been warned! :-)

If this article has helped you to solve your problem, then please let us know in the comments section below, and don't forget to share this article on Facebook and Twitter!

Paul Freeman-Powell is a technology, software and hardware enthusiast. He founded and owns caeus.com Ltd. and works as a web developer, IT consultant and computer repair technician. In his spare time, he speaks French and Spanish fluently and is also a keen drummer and photographer (but not at the same time). His personal web site can be found at www.paulfp.net.

Copyright © caeus.com Ltd. 2011. This article and all its contents are the property of caeus.com Limited and are protected by copyright. You may not distribute, modify, transmit, reuse, repost, or use the content of this article for public or commercial purposes (including text and images) without written permission from caeus.com Limited. The views expressed in this article and sites linked to herein are solely those of the author or individual(s) providing them and do not reflect the opinions of caeus.com Ltd., its parents, affiliates or subsidies. Any trademarks and brands mentioned in this article are the property of their respective owners and their use does not imply any affiliation with, or endorsement by, caeus.com Limited. The content of this article is provided in good faith and for information purposes only; you follow any advice given entirely at your own risk and no responsibility can be taken for any consequences which may arise as a result of following advice given in this article.