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#1
03-17-2010, 09:36 AM
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Is there only one good stick of memory on the planet?
I have a machine that was blue screening consistently on boot. It is a Dell Dimension 4700 that has 2 X 256MB PC2-3200 RAM installed. I removed one of the sticks and the machine started working fine. I moved the working stick to each of the 3 memory slots and everything stayed stable. I advised the customer to upgrade memory and I bought 2 X 1GB PC2-5300 RAM (PNY). When I installed the new RAM, the machine started blue screening immediately. I ran individual memory tests on the new RAM and it fails miserably. I am doubtful that I got 2 bad sticks of memory, but ordered 2 more just to be sure.
One thing of interest that I noticed is that one of the capacitors near the RAM slots is slightly bulged at the top. I would totally expect a bad cap to cause this type of behavior, but the fact that the computer runs fine with one of old 256 sticks of memory makes my head hurt  . Anybody out there have similar experiences?
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#2
03-17-2010, 10:45 AM
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I don't think I've ever bought a bad stick of RAM but I'm sure it will happen.
The chances of all 4 of those sticks being bad seems a bit low. I think you should test the on your bench machine to see if you get the same results.
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#4
03-17-2010, 01:51 PM
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Happened to me. Client had two sticks of RAM, determined that one was bad, went to Fry's and bought another one, got back and stuck it in, wouldn't boot. Determined that the new stick was bad, went and exchanged it. The new new stick worked.
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#5
03-17-2010, 02:25 PM
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Quote:
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#6
03-17-2010, 03:03 PM
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I would take the new "bad ram" and stick it in a known good computer and runs memtest86+ against it.
If its clean then you got other problems. If it fails then you got bad ram. Thats how you check when you got this kind of situation. Dont assume the new ram is bad because its failing in the machine you bought it for. If you dont have a machine to test it then you are stuck, not a good place to be when clients are depending on your expertise. Building a machine that can take DDR2 should cost you almost nothing. Last edited by NYJimbo; 03-17-2010 at 03:10 PM.
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#7
03-17-2010, 03:57 PM
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Re;
Yup, same here.
I got a Dell Inspiron 1150 from a friend for free with only 512 MB. Went to Fry's to buy 2 Gigs. Got home, installed the Ram, laptop would not boot up. It came down to 1 GB memory stick that was bad. (I am sure it wasn't static that killed it). Got it replaced, everything is running just great. My wife loves her present.  When I was working for this computer store in O.C., this guy brings in his desktop with a hard drive problem (HDD crashed). He bought 2 Sata hard drives, brand new, from Frys. My colleague has problem with one of the hard drives to make it take Windows XP. He calls me for ideas, after playing around with the BIOS, cables, etc. Found out BIOS was not reading the HDD, which lead to the conclusion that it was a bad hard drive. We didn't bother testing more; we just used the 2nd Sata HDD and fixed the desktop. We got the other drive replaced. In a nutshell, you will get brand new hardware that is bad from out of the box. It's not out of the ordinary.
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. I need to get another bench machine soon.
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