[Techtalk] Trouble with upgrading RAM

[Helen Rosseau]

Your co worker's suggestion about the power supply is the common problem and 
purchasing a larger power supply is normally the solution.  Due to dirt and 
other factors not all power supplies last the same length of time or have the 
capability of sustaining the power load.  Also, though not too usual, the 
speed of the RAM might be the culprit.  The slower RAM should be in the first 
slot and the faster RAM  in the second.

Helen

On Thursday 29 April 2004 11:23, Riccarda Cassini wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I seem to be having a hardware problem - at least I think so...
> I recently upgraded my somewhat older box (Athlon 800MHz generation)
> to 512MB RAM.  Originally, there was one 256MB module in the machine,
> and I put in another one, which looks rather identical to me (even same
> manufacturer: Fujitsu-Siemens, if that matters).  From that moment on,
> I've been experiencing sporadic hangups or crashes - about once every
> other day, on average. At least considerably more often than I've come
> to expect from a system running Linux.  The exact symptoms vary widely:
> applications coredumping, X server crashing or freezing, kernel oops,
> and in some cases, not even a warm boot was possible any more, so I had
> to use the physical reset button to restart the machine.
>
> I luckily don't seem to have lost any vital data until now, but it is
> a little annoying to have to wait for the forced filesystem check to
> complete every time (takes more than 20 minutes for my 80GB disk...)
> Yes, I know it's my own fault that I'm still using ext2, and not some
> journaled filesystem like ext3, Reiser or XFS... [*]
>
> I got the RAM module from a friend, who no longer needs it. He assured
> me that he never had any problems with it. As I didn't pay a cent, and
> in fact don't know him that well, I don't really want to bother him
> with any hard to find hardware troubles.
>
> I ran memtest86 for a couple of hours, and it didn't report any errors.
> From this I conclude that the module does at least not have a permanent
> defect.  I then removed the original (working) RAM module, so now there
> was only the potentially defective module in the machine. Surprisingly,
> with this, I was no longer experiencing any crashes during the period I
> was running this hardware setup (for about three weeks).
>
> Hoping that the problem would've magically disappeared somehow in the
> meantime, I put the second RAM module back in a couple of days ago.
> Well, it hasn't - same problem again :-(
>
> Someone at work suggested it might be the power supply.  Not being a
> hardware geek, I can't really say whether that would make sense. The
> same machine was working without any problems for over two years now.
> So, before I go off to buy a new power supply, I'd like to get some
> other opinions on that issue.
>
> If there are any hardware details I should've mentioned, I'll try to
> supply them...
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Riccarda
>
>
> [*] BTW, any recommendations on which filesystem to use? Any good/bad
> experiences with some of them, WRT speed, stability, error recovery
> facilities, and whatever else there might be relevant.  I've heard
> opinions that XFS is performing rather well in most aspects, so I'm
> considering to try this one, if I should finally pluck up the courage
> to kick out my old ext2.
> (I'm aware that a topic like this might possess a certain inflammatory
> potential, as with any topics that involve personal preferences or
> experience, like editors, window managers, programming languages, etc.
> As I've observed so far on these lists, however, cases like these are
> handled remarkably well - so I dared asking :-)