I’m no stranger to pushing hardware past its limits. For example, seven years ago, I tracked down an issue that prevented 16 GB of RAM being used in a motherboard that only supported 8. It ended up being a one-line GRUB hack to fix one of the ACPI tables that was mistakenly overlapping a PCI memory region with the RAM region and causing Windows to bluescreen.
Around the same timeframe, I began cobbling together another computer using a motherboard from an eMachines EL1200. The EL1200 was a cheap machine that came out in 2008. I found the motherboard on eBay for next to nothing, and it was also easy to find an Athlon X2 4850e to go with it. This particular motherboard only officially supports 2 GB of RAM in each of its two slots for a total of 4 GB, but I knew that 4 GB DDR2 sticks existed, so I went ahead and tried to put 8 GB in it. Why not? They were easy to find and inexpensive.
The 8 GB of RAM worked perfectly fine and I was able to boot into Linux. This honestly didn’t surprise me too much. I ran memory tests and they all came back perfect. The computer worked great with 8 GB of RAM.
Then, I tried to enter the BIOS setup by pressing F2 at startup when the eMachines splash screen came up:
Read the rest of this entry
