Acer Aspire 5003wlmi RAM upgrade, help please!

[Computer_Commando]

Usually, low density will work in high density motherboard, but not the other way around.  First time I heard of a laptop problem.  It could be that the eBay vendor sold you mislabeled RAM.  Whether intentional or not, it's always best to stay away from eBay, because it's mostly close-out or grey market junk that can't be sold anywhere else.  They could even be Chinese knockoffs of name brand devices.

Unless you can buy the modules locally, you can't go wrong with Crucial, their database seems to always be 100% correct.  BTW, they are a division of Micron, who manufactures the chips & the modules.  Micron now owns Lexar.
Says this on one of the web pages:  © 2011 Micron Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.

[Gretz98]

Thanks again for the advice. I'll just go and order the chips from Crucial and save myself the headache.

[Computer_Commando]

If it doesn't work this time, you know for sure it's the Acer.
Did you run CPU-Z and/or HWInfo32?  They provide lots of useful info.  HWInfo32 provides real-time temperature monitoring.

[Gretz98]

I'm running a defrag on one of the hard drives right now, but am going to run it through both of those sites as soon as it is done.

Given the cost of upgrading the memory ($110 after tax for 2 x 1GB through Crucial), would you recommend looking into purchasing a new computer altogether? I've been hoping to buy a new one in the near future since I've had this one for nearly five years, but was hoping to keep my cost down in the short term by upgrading the Acer's memory.

[Computer_Commando]

The problem is DDR memory is 3-4 times the cost of newer DDR2 memory.  DDR was only around for a year or 2 before it was replaced with DDR2; latest cpu's use DDR3.

I've got 2 older computers that both use DDR RAM.  I just paid $20 (on sale) for one 512MB RAM module; computer has 2 slots with 1GB max memory.

You could save some money by only replacing 1-256MB with 1-1024MB = 1280MB-64MB= 1216MB RAM available to Windows
Some of the RAM is shared with the graphics card:  SiSM760GX integrated 3D graphics controller with 64MB shared RAM