[Techtalk] Trouble with upgrading RAM

[Tracey Clark]

And it was said by Riccarda Cassini-->
> Okay, did my homework: after quite some time of unsuccessful poking
> around at the company's website

Reminds me of when I tried to get information off the ASUS websites :p
Google is indeed your friend. If the model #'s are the same on the two
chips, and you're pretty sure they are the same type (out of that
bajillion possible types, heh), let's rule that out for now.

To eliminate the slim possibility that your power supply is the problem,
simply unplug another component from the power supply & boot up with
everything else being the same (and both memory chips in). I'd recommend
the CD drive, as it consumes enough power to account for the power supply
being possibly near to capacity. If the PC powers up and exhibits the
same problems after taking another component out of the power chain,
you've eliminated the power supply as the source of trouble.

Side note - usually when a power supply is overloaded, you see things not
powering up at all on boot, a lot of times it will be a hard drive. This
will cause the PC to have trouble booting or give you beeps etc.

Thought - in your bios, do you have any alarms that it is possible to
turn on? If so, it's time consuming but worth trying to turn them on one
by one, boot, and see if they go off.

> I finally remembered google and
> entered HYS72V32300GU. The model numbers of both sticks start with the
> common substring HYS72V32300GU-7-D, followed by some other differing
> numbers (I figured those could be a serial number or something...)

After searching Google, I can confirm that.

> BTW, I was more than naive as to the gazillion of different DRAM
> memory types there exist: SDRAM, DDR, DDR2, RLDRAM (all in either
> unbuffered, registered, ECC, 1.8/2.5/3.3V, etc. versions)...

It can be a little overwhelming, yes. :o

> I downloaded the datasheet PDF for my stick, but then concluded that
> its 16-pages full of technical details is definitely more than I ever
> wanted to know...

Most likely you'll never need all that information, unless you plan on
going into hardware design.

> Unfortunately, that still leaves the issue unresolved for the moment.
> Someone else suggested (off-list) that the second socket might be the
> problem.  I guess I'll do some more testing. This will take its time,
> though, because the crashes are only occurring sporadically.

It is worth testing the memory in another socket. However, I'd think that
if there was a socket problem, the memory test would have shown problems
communicating with the memory? I might be misunderstanding how that
works, but I would think it would be inevitable.

> On the other hand, I don't have too many components in that computer -
> it's pretty standard: 1 harddisk, CD-ROM, CD-burner, floppy, graphics
> card, soundcard, NIC.  However, I was told that this particular version
> of the Athlon processor is consuming a substantial amount of energy...
> Also, I never tried to plug in some other additional component - maybe
> that would've caused the same kind of problem(?)

*If* you were close to maxing out your power supply to the point where 1
Watt made a difference then yes - anything else you plugged in would
cause a problem.

Good luck :) Let us know how it progresses.


-- 
Tracey
Linux Counter #264789

"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely
unintentional side effect." - Linus Torvalds, New York Times, 28 Sept 03