Dead Memory on a Compaq...

Hurricane Andrew

Golden Member
Nov 28, 2004
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Restarted my work box today (it's a lousey d220 microtower that's been in service for over a year) and couldn't get a video signal upon reboot. Opened it up, everything was seated fine, still couldn't even get POST...just the monitor's no video signal display.

Finally, I narrowed it down to the RAM. I had two sticks, the stock HP 256MB module and a 512MB Crucial/Samsung module that I added in January since the machine is used for backing up check image archive DVD's from our processor. Pulled out the HP module, and everything was fine. Tried the HP module by itself in both DIMM slots (just to make sure it wasn't the slot) and nothing. The Crucial module worked fine in either slot.

Bottom line is it appears the HP module just died on me. It's not like this is a super heavy duty PC. OK, I do crunch Seti on it, but other than that its just internet, word processing and spreadsheets. I've never had RAM fail on me before (then again, I only buy Crucial) but I guess it does happen. Is my scenario how it typically goes?

P.S. I hate Compaq. Thankfully our new IT vendor doesn't sell them :D
 

Sunner

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Happens once in a while, had a Crucial PC2100 stick fail on me out of nowhere, though it was kinda annoying, cause it developed relatively few errors, so it didn't crash my computer or aanything, just caused downloaded files to become corrupt, etc etc.

But yeah, $hit happens.