Can I buy an ECC SDRAM, or do I have to buy non-ECC SDRAM?

Question

I'm helping a relative of mine with computer maintenance. She has a Compaq Presario 5000 (10yrs old) and it's slow. My first thing was to look at the memory -- it has only 512MB, but its maximum memory is 768MB. Crucial.com shows that it takes non-ECC SDRAM memory.

Staples has 256MB SDRAM ECC memory. Can I buy an ECC SDRAM, or do I have to buy non-ECC SDRAM?

Answer 1

ECC and non-ECC memory modules are not compatible and won't work. They should be expensive because they are rare, too. Making the laptop 2GB is not enought, either. Its disk & CPU are also slow.

Answer 2

I am pretty sure there is non-ECC version of the same memory type for sale somewhere; just look at the memory specifications, not just memory advertised for that particular computer model.

Also, with that old machine, any cheap, new nettop bests it in performance, so upgrading might make sense.