Okay Im trying to help revive a 3 yr old Lenovo ThinkPad T30 and I know enough about desktops but havent really messed around with notebooks too much.

I just got the 2GB of memory I ordered and its the Corsair DDR 333MHz. I popped them in and it only recognizes 1GB of RAM? I switched the cards and it still only recognizes 1GB so it is not a defective stick of RAM.

Any advice?

The operating system is Windows XP proffesional and its suppose to support 2GB.

 

make sure you're placing them in the correct order.
memory slots are usually 1-2-1-2 and you have to pair up the same memory in slot 1 and 1. and 2 in 2.
how many ram sticks are you using? normally you want to have all the same ram on the motherboard instead of mix-matching.

 

it is a laptop, there are only 2 slots for memory and i am using x2 1GB sticks of RAM

 

2 things. First try switching them/reversing slots. Also, check the BIOS for auto-detect settings for memory. If neither of those work, try putting only 1 stick in booting to XP. Powerdown add the second stick and boot back. Let us know...

 

Also, to save time keep booting to BIOS. If your BIOS doesn't see it, then XP wont.

 

it must be a bad socket for the 2nd memory stick. switching the sticks is the same so theyre both good. and the bios doesnt recognize the 2nd slot for some reason.

 

Check the manufacturers website.

It might be your laptop has a maximum of 1GB of RAM.

This can sometimes be increased with a BIOS update.

 

Have you tried installing 1 stick and moving it between slots. If the system won't boot when memory is only in one of the slots, then it's possible that the slot is bad.

My old Aluminum PowerBook G4 developed a problem where 1 stick of memory would work in either slot, but if you installed two sticks of memory, the system wouldn't recognize the stick in the lower slot. It was retarded and Apple knew about the problem, but they claimed my serial number didn't fall within the range of affect laptops. that.

Or, like Kikaida stated, it's possible the laptop only supports 1 GB RAM max.

 

The T30 only takes a maximum of 1 GB of RAM.

http://www.memory.com//net/System.aspx?model=28531

 

man I shudve done more research before buying the 2GBs of memory when I could only use 1GB