How did I fix this POST failure?

Thought for sure my 2003-era Dell was dead and gone last night. I had just installed EVE online and was running through a newbie system. The graphics hard-froze and the soundcard exploded into an excessively pre-amped, high-pitched whine that I'm sure would have damaged my stereo if I hadn't cut it out right away.

Five minutes after a hard poweroff, I try to boot it up again, and got a series of POST beeps: LONG LONG SHORT SHORT LONG SHORT. This error would not clear up by itself, as I discovered when I tried to boot the machine up a couple more times in order to be sure I had recorded the beeps correctly.

I looked Dell POST beeps up online but couldn't find anything that seemed to match. I checked the manual which didn't mention anything about POST beeps but then realized there was a set of diagnostic lights on the back.

These lights indicated a memory configuration error. I noticed there was a separate error for memory failure but it wasn't triggered. I thought to myself that the only likely cause was that the motherboard wasn't recognizing the matched pairs of DDR properly.

So, I opened up the case, removed all the RAM chips, and re-seated them. Voila, success. So what happened?

I can only think of two explanations, and one of them is a bit absurd (I'll let you guess which one):

1. Hardware failure somehow actually dislodged a RAM chip? A little electrical explosion that somehow didn't fry all my RAM yet produced this much force?

2. Some residual charge left in the RAM that was preventing a proper initialization, and for whatever reason, wasn't fixed until I actually physically disconnected the chips?


Any explanation would be received with great interest and much appreciation.

 

Greetings, yeeha.

Okay, I'll bite: #1 is the absurd scenario.

Strange symptoms. May not have necessarily been a "residual charge" - more likely some memory management glitch between the OS and EVE interaction, and everything reset when you reinstalled the modules. I get the same sort of memory lock issues occasionally with different games and software configurations.

What OS and SP#, by the way?