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New RAM dies?


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#1
adqjohn

adqjohn

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I have inherited one of those tiny VAIO VGN-T350 laptops. Win XP pro. It has a notoriously slow HDD and comes with nonremovable 512MB of RAM. Max allowable is 1GB. I bought a 512 stick of microDIMM from Kingston and installed today. Properties said I had .99GB of RAM. Seemed to help the overall performance right away.

So I cleaned up the overloaded startup menu in MSCONFIG and that helped speed up the bootup. Did a Disk Cleanup and gained a few gigs of space. Started a BIG Disk Defrag and left the house for a couple of hours. When I got back, the screensaver had froze. Whaaat? Rebooted and it would not start at all.

Removed the new RAM and it booted right up. I have done a lot of RAM upgrades but this has never happened to me before. I have always received good RAM from Kingston.

So my question is: is this indicative of defective ram from them (to only work a few hours), or could something else have fried it?

Thanx
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#2
Tyger

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I'd give it another try. There is always the off chance that it wasn't seated properly and the connection came loose. But if the RAM wasn't burned in at the factory, which I suspect not, then the first 10 or 100 hours should be considered a test, and you may need to return it for another stick.
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#3
adqjohn

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Tyger, thanx for the reply. After I pulled it out and got a sucessfull boot, I did reinstall (twice) to check it. No luck, startup won't even flicker. I have an RMA and am returning it.

I am curious though as to what you mean by "But if the RAM wasn't burned in at the factory,..." ?? What is "burning in"? Like a load test?

Keep on keepin on,

JR
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#4
John Hook

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adqjohn,

My experience has been that if RAM is going to go BAD - it goes bad quickly. It sounds like that's what happened to you. The "burn in" is when they run a system continuously for several hours before delivering to the user - as again, generally if something's going to fail like RAM - it typically happends early in the life of a PC. There ARE situations, where inadequate cooling can damage components - so I'm not making a blanket statement that hardware DOESN'T go bad after a period of time. It's just that "questionalble" RAM generally fails early in the life of a system.

Hope this helps.

- John
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#5
adqjohn

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JH

Hey, everything I pickup from all of you here, HELPS. I hadn't given heat much thot. This microDIMM is the tiniest ram I've seen and it sits under the keyboard next to a tiny little fan that doesn't have much output. Hmmmm.... Well I'll see what happens when I get the replacement.

Thanx

JR
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