Ram Problems

Recently I started to have problems with my computer not booting. We often have power outages in my neighborhood and it is not too uncommon for me to walk into my home office and see my computer either off, or waiting for the windows user login.

Recently, the computer was off, i powered it back up but it would never even post. Nothing. I hear the hard drives fire up, the CPU fan going, a green light on the motherboard but nothing on screen. The power light on the monitor would even stay amber instead of green when it gets a signal from the computer. So to make a long story short, the only thing that I did to get it to boot back up was to remove the 1G memory sticks from the A1 and B1 slots. So Suspecting it was the memory, I went and purchased anotehr pair of 1G sticks and put them in. Now the computer boots up but it tells me that the sticks do not match and that the computer will run better of they did. Well, i know they are exactly the same, even from the same manufacturer, Kingston. any ideas on qhy I am getting this error when I put in all four sticks?

Thanks,
Houston

 

Most likely Channel A and Channel B aren't matched anymore, and that is why you are getting that message. You can test this by running the new pair alone in A and then the old pair alone in A and see if the message comes up when only two modules are installed.

The computer would run better, yes, but we are talking about something similar to the difference between single and dual channel, which is around 5-10% and if running at a total of 4GB you're probably going to get enough from the sheer amount of RAM that you don't need that extra 5-10%. Unless you are doing high-end gaming or video editing on this computer of course... in which case you're going to end up having to purchase enough memory to guarantee four identical modules. It's up to you if you think the gain in performance is worth the money or not.