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DOOM Anomaly

The RAM dam. (Computer dee-lee) :D

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Hoodle-Doodles.

My brother's computer has been dying a lot lately like mine was in the past (runs in the family? :P) so he got some new RAM, he had 120MB and just bought now a 256MB one of the same type. (AMS I think it was.) When the new RAM in placed in to replace the old one, and when the computer is turned on, it simply makes a lot of noise and keeps letting out these long 1-2 second beeps, and just keeps doing that. The same reaction it gave when we (for some reason) turned it on with no RAM in it at all. I tried putting the old RAM back in and the computer turned on at first normally, but keeps dying before the Windows XP loading screen comes up; it beeps normally and makes some loud sounds, but clicks and just won't load any further, the screen going black.

The guy at the store said that it would be easy to install, but it seems to be a little more than I thought. :P I know nothing of this, so it is beyond me as to what I am to try. I'm not even sure if it was the RAM that was causing the problems all along.

My apologies for so many computer questions. Can anyone help us out here? :D

Thanks. :D

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Well that could be it, but the thing is that the computer would start up (eventually after a long time of shutting it on and off and it dying) before we took out the old RAM. I guess I could stick his hard drive into my computer to see if it is actually the harddrive itself.

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insertwackynamehere said:

Hmm look in your motherboard manual. See what the beeps correspond to. They are error codes disguised as beeps ;)

I'll have to see if he has a motherboard manual. :P I'll look into that now, I'll see if it can help. :D

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Make sure the new RAM is *exactly* the same type as the old. I accidentally bought 64x4 (64mb/chip x 4chips/side) RAM instead of 32/8 and my mobo only recognized the first 128MB of it. Yours probably reacts worse to differing memory types.

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Seeing as you managed to screw up this much so far, I would just bring it to a service technician and let them handle it, unless you want to accidently screw it up even more. :/

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fodders said:

Go into bios it will need to update itself to recognise the new ram.

May I ask how that is done?

udderdude said:

Seeing as you managed to screw up this much so far, I would just bring it to a service technician and let them handle it, unless you want to accidently screw it up even more. :/

Hahahaha, I think that's what my brother is going to do. :P

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DOOM Anomaly said:

May I ask how that is done?

Hahahaha, I think that's what my brother is going to do. :P

Press del or F2, you will see a msg when it boots saying "press xx to enter setup (or it may say press xx to enter bios), if the msg is too quick, unplug keyboard, that should give a msg "keyboard error F1 to continue xx for setup", then plug keyboard in, reboot and press the key it told you to.

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fodders said:

Press del or F2, you will see a msg when it boots saying "press xx to enter setup (or it may say press xx to enter bios), if the msg is too quick, unplug keyboard, that should give a msg "keyboard error F1 to continue xx for setup", then plug keyboard in, reboot and press the key it told you to.

Cool. :D I'll try that out. :D

Thanks. :D

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Just after you removed and replaced the RAM, you should have reset the CMOS by moving the jumper next to the CMOS battery over to the other position. For example, if it was over pin 1 and 2, move it to pin 2 and 3. Wait for 30 seconds and put it back. If you don't have that jumper, remove the battery from the holder for 30 seconds and put it back. This is something that should always be done when messing with the RAM.

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Hahaha, well my brother got impatient and just went to get a new computer from my mom's friend. :P

Thanks for the help though. :D

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I've never heard of needing to clear the CMOS just for installing new RAM. I've never needed to do it, and I don't know of anyone else who has.

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Well he got a new computer. The odd thing is, we tried to put in his old hard drive so that he wouldn't lose his data, but when we set it as the master drive, the computer kept dying like it did before. So we came to the conclusion that it was the hard drive. :P

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DOOM Anomaly said:

Well he got a new computer. The odd thing is, we tried to put in his old hard drive so that he wouldn't lose his data, but when we set it as the master drive, the computer kept dying like it did before. So we came to the conclusion that it was the hard drive. :P


er...dying? By any chance was it running Windows NT, 2000, or XP?

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Did it recognise the drive at boot? You will probably need to go into bios to select it tho'.

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fodders said:

Did it recognise the drive at boot? You will probably need to go into bios to select it tho'.

After finally getting it to recognize the drive as the master primary, it seemed all dandy, the boot menu dee-lee had it as the Master Primary drive, but it kept crashing/dying like it did with his old computer. Since the same thing was happening with this new computer, and the only part of the old computer we had left in the new one was the Hard Drive, by process of elimination, we figured it was the Hard Drive that was making the computer crash.

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I bought a memory chip that came with instructions to clear the CMOS, so I did.
You need to pay attention to what screen the computer crashes at. Here are some general errors:
Black screen: motherboard or video card problem
The first screen: BIOS or drive problem
The third screen (Windows XP loading): operating system problem
If the computer crashes while trying to load the operating system, it isn't necessarily a problem with the drive itself. Also, you can't move a hard drive with XP installed on it to another computer, it won't work.

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