The scenario

I have a HP Pavilion dv6 3030tx.
This is a Core i5-540M Notebook with 4GB of memory.
It is upgradeable to 8GB (2x4GB).
This computer is running Windows 7 – 64bit Home

The problem

I found some memory on eBay and purchased some Corsair CMSO8GX3M2A1333C9.

When this arrived I put them in the Notebook and the BIOS seemed to reference them saying 8GB on board but the PC would not boot and kept crashing about 5 seconds into loading windows.

I tried to run mem test and it would crash after about 3 seconds.

(Note: the eBay guy happily refunded the memory once I confirmed that they were incompatible. So I will give him a little plug, D & D Computers Online and their eBay store D & D International eBay Store
If you are in Australia, they were very understanding with my problem, so you can do much worse than buying from them.
End Plug now.)

The solution

The compatible memory for this computer is:

• DDR3-1066
• PC3-8500
• CAS: 7-7-7-20
• Non-ECC
• Unbuffered

These specs all looked fine on the corsair memory above, apart from one thing…

The Intel HM55 southbridge chip set will only be able to use memory packaged with 256Mx8 memory modules

What does this mean?
To make 4GB of memory I could do it with 8 x 512MB memory chips or I could use 16 x 256MB chips.
(If you have a look at some memory photos you can see this as either 4 or 8 memory blocks on one side of the memory circuit board.)

The Intel HM55 chipset cannot use memory with 512Mx8 memory.

The Pavilion dv6 3030tx runs the HM55 intel chipset and hence you need to find memory with the specific 256Mx8 memory packaging.

Links

Here are some links to the various forum posts that I used to get to this answer.

• RAMCity memory that I eventually purchased
• HP Support Forum
• Corsair support forum – RAMGuy