[aqes23]

Hi there,

I've been having some pretty strange RAM memory issues lately, I wonder if any of you have some clues to what's going on. Here's the story:

I have an AMD Athlon 1,05Ghz running Windows XP Professional SP2, with an MSI K7N420Pro motherboard. I mainly use it to record music in Pro Tools and those kind of things.

The only noticeable strange thing I was having lately was that after shutdown it sometimes still kept some things running like the fan, the optic mouse and the usb periphericals, without 'really' shutting down. Every once in a while I had to keep the power button pressed to switch it off completely.

Up till now it had two 256mb ram memory sticks installed, working no problem:
a Elixir m2u25664ds88a07-75B, 256mb, DDR 266 Mhz C.L.2.5, PC2100U-25330
and a Kingston KVR 400X64C3A/256

I wanted to upgrade the memory to two 512mb sticks, so I went to the shop and received:
two Apacer 512mb UNB PC3200 CL3

I placed them in the system, but it wouldn't even boot, i.e. the Award BIOS wouldn't even load, but only make an intermittent beeping noise every few seconds. From the little LEDs on the back of the pc I could understand it stalled in the 'Early Chipset Initialization' stage. Tried every possible combination, 1 at a time, different slots, but no change. The manual states the beeping is a RAM problem.

So I tried placing the two old memory sticks in again, but the same thing happened, it kept on beeping and I couldn't get it to work. I finally managed to make it work using the Elixir 256mb stick only, but it would still randomly get stuck in the beeping mode on reboot.
Strange thing is even when the Elixir stick would work, I tried adding the old Kingston stick, after rebooting it would beep, and even after removing the Kingston stick and rebooting it would still have the same problem, even though the single Elixir stick worked fine on its own just a second before!

Tried clearing the CMOS with the jumper, no effect. Also tried resetting the BIOS to default values, no effect.

Also tried another brand of stick, a
Corsair Valueselect VS512MB400 DDR1 400Mhz, PC3200
but this one also has the same effect.

So now I'm stuck with a PC running with half the memory it was running on before!
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

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How many ram slots? If it has 4 you usually need to put the sticks in the 1 and 3 slots.... Are you able to run memtest at all?
-P.

[p-zero]

How many ram slots? If it has 4 you usually need to put the sticks in the 1 and 3 slots.... Are you able to run memtest at all?
-P.

[aqes23]

Thanks for the reply.

It has 3 RAM slots, I tried all the various combinations with the new and old memory sticks.
At the moment it does boot up with 256mb every once in a while, it sometimes remains stuck in the beeping mode.
How do I run memtest?

[The Skeptic]

Try to clean the ram contacts and slots with a soft brush. Try again to reset the BIOS (Make sure the power cable is unplugged and take the cmos battery out for about 15 minutes). If you have a voltmeter check the cmos battery. Voltage should be at least 3 volt.

If you did all these and still have the problem then I have a feeling that the motherboard is faulty. The fact that you had turn-off problems also support a motherboard problem.