Ram

I am upgrading RAM on an older machine. The machine's total capacity is listed as 256k (sdram 100) and there are two slots.
Will one 256k dimm work, or can each slot only handle 128k?

It will probably take all 256MB in one DIMM, but to be truly sure you'd need the motherboard manual.

Perhaps you could search for the manual knowing the model number of the board.

It is possible, but usually the max ram size given is the max capacity of each slot, times the number of slots.

i.e.: 128 x 2 = 256

But as Alaric points out, with the make and model of the board we could be allot more accurate.

also, welcome to VDr.

Thanks for the help. The machine is a HP and instead of trying to track down the mobo specks, I just experimented. In this case one slot handeled 256k of memory.

you could have also split it across two slots, doesn't really matter

Except that it is ever slightly that much faster having RAM installed at the highest density possible.
So, one 256MB stick will be faster than two 128's.

Packing more ram in to one slot doesn't necessarily produce increased performance (small as it may be). Dependending on the mb/chipset, memory module configuration, interleaving, etc. issues related to refreshing can produce better performance with more than one slot occupied. In the end though the gains or losses are not something that in most cases would be (as AlaricD said) noticeable.

In this case it was a matter of only having one 256k dim on hand. I will keep your comments in mind however next time the issue arises.