🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm considering the purchase of a 486DX2 66MHz PC.  The seller (Gateway 2000)
advertises that these systems are capable of being configured with a 
maximum of 64MBytes of main DRAM memory.  Investigation has shown that
their motherboards have four SIMM slots.  Currently, Gateway does not offer
the 16MByte SIMMs.  In fact, their sales rep sez that they only have the
4MByte SIMMs so if I *did* purchase from them, I could currently only
get a maximum of 16MBytes (four slots X 4MByte SIMM) total configured
at this time.

The sales rep also sez that Gateway currently has no plans to announce
*when* they may be offering the 16MByte SIMM arrays.  This raises a couple
questions in my mind:

1.  How ethical is it to advertise that a CPU being offered can be 
configured to 64Mbytes when in fact the vendor cannot provide this 
option?  It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a matter of a *date*, that
could be provided to me by the vendor.  ie... If they told me that on
Nov 1, 1992 we will be able to sell you the 16MByte arrays...

They cannot even tell me if I will have to 'eat' the 4MByte SIMMs once
they do (if ever) provide the higher capacity memory.  I would like to
think that I could get full credit of the 4MB SIMMs on an upgrade purchase
of equal capacity 16MByte SIMMs.  Gateway is not alone in this misleading
advertising practice.

2.  I have turned and read *every* page in this months issue of 
_Computer Shopper_.  I only saw one advertisement for 16MByte SIMMs.  Is
this beast so very new to the PC world that they are not yet available?
I'm trying to determine if it would be possible to purchase the 16MB
SIMMs from a 3rd party source and just install them myself.  If yes,
what else to I have to consider?  Are there others things that I am
missing? (like the ability to address the higher areas of memory)

Does anyone know more about this?  Please share it with the rest of us.
On a related note, the single ad it saw was for 80nS 16MByte SIMM.  Does
a faster SIMM exist in the 16MBytes capacity?  The 4MByte arrays that
are currently being offered are of the 70nS variety.

You can reply to me directly or post and share the knowledge with others.
Thanks in advance.


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