Comment by zozbot234
3 days ago
There's cheap adapters that allow you to use SO-DIMM memory in desktop DIMM slots. Of course performance will suffer compared to native DIMM sticks, but if you happen to have SO-DIMM laying around that you aren't currently using, this might be a nice use for it.
Oh, man.
This conjures up vivid memories of being in the middle 1990s, with my first Pentium build on a Triton (FX) chipset board. The motherboard only accepted 72-pin SIMMs, but those were still pretty rare and expensive for me.
Instead of buying new expensive RAM, I used memory adapters I used to get that going. IIRC, they were branded SimmVerter.
Each adapter allowed a person to install four 30-pin SIMMs (which were very cheap and common) into one 72-pin SIMM socket on a motherboard.
I had four such adapters, and they were each of different shape: One for each variation of tall-vs-short, and also for left-vs-right. These shapes allowed for all four of the adapters to be used concurrently on a motherboard with 4 72-pin slots without them physically interfering with eachother.
It was so much fun back then to try to get all sixteen 30-pin SIMMs to function reliably.
Things became even more fun when I decided to mix in some 72-pin EDO SIMMs, and get each of them working with their respective features enabled.
(And I said all of that with a lot of sarcasm, but: I did eventually get it all to work reliably-enough for my purposes back then. I also learned a ton of stuff about cleaning electrical contacts, maintaining fast mechanical alignment, conclusively identifying problematic modules through testing, and optimizing physical layouts. These are skills that I've been able to get out and productively use on occasion during the 30-ish years that have subsequently passed.
While I can look back on that with a bit of positivity, I'm not sure that people are ready for that kind of thing today. A lot of folks weren't ready for it back then, either -- adapters like that, while being a [mostly] electrically-sound concept, were popularly considered to be cursed.)