[WMCoolmon]

Here's the deal - I put a somewhat used 256 MB chip of RAM into my computer. I'm pretty damn sure it's good; the computer it was in was working fine, and I ran metest86+ (which comes with Ubuntu) for an hour; it did ~4 passes and reported no problems.

However, this is after I discovered that Windows apparently enjoys randomly bluescreening now, soon after the login screen pops up. (Sometimes it waits 'til I log in, sometimes not.)

In order to install the memory, I had to disconnect the GF6600GT, hard drive, and CD-rom. I'm pretty sure it's seated correctly; I made sure both of the little thingamabobs clicked.

After shutting it down and double-checking my work, I checked and found that I'd forgotten to hook up the GF6600GT's auxiliary power connector. (The odd thing is that I'd done the same thing before but that time, Windows was able to boot up and run fine, although it did give me an error.)

After plugging it back in, the same problem has continued to happen, although Ubuntu worked afterwords (before it was unable to start the X server).

Ubuntu works now, but Windows has continued to bluescreen, although the error seems to vary. I'm going to keep on trying to troubleshoot it by toying with BIOS settings (Safe mode also seems to work fine). Any help would be appreciated though; hopefully I don't have to  buy a new video card or repeat the process to get the memory out.

[BlackDove]

Yeah I have the same problem myself, although there are tons of **** wrong with my computer.

Weird thing is, it only happens when I turn it off for more than 10 minutes then turn it on. It'll fatal, fatal, bluescreen, reboot about 15 times, and then it'll boot nicely into Windows.

If I reboot, it won't cause problems. But if I turn it off.....all over again.

Anyway, probably something wired in a bad way as far as I go.

Good luck.

[WMCoolmon]

Well, I finally spent the ~30 minutes required to get it out, and things are working fine again.

Why Linux didn't seem to have a problem with it, I don't know...whatever the reason, 256 more MB aren't worth bluescreens 15/16 attempts on the PC, I reboot too often for that.

I did try various BIOS changes, but nothing seemed to help at all.

[Nix]

The RAM could be good, perhaps your motherboard didnt like the type of RAM it was.  Say you mixed a PC100 and PC133 chips on the same board.  In a perfect world, the 133 chip would downclock to 100, but in some cases, it just wreaks havoc on the system.  I had a G4 mac that could only take PC100 sticks of RAM (even though the board supported PC 133) and boot up proper.  I dunno.  Motherboards and RAM can be very picky.

(In my experiences, Athlon 64 based systems are extremely picky)

[WMCoolmon]

They were both DDR400, actually, Kingston made both. One was 256 MB, the other was 512. The 256 MB one was the new one, although I do have an A64. *shrugs*

[StratComm]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon (sig)
"Singh and StratComm have been fixed." -Goober5000

That's so wrong

I've had generally bad experiences when mixing RAM sizes, though by all expectations that is perfectly fine.  Windows may not particularly like the change (it does notice when you add more memory, so it keeps that stored somewhere) so it's possible that the handler for the memory size change is corrupt.  Does it fix itself if you remove the new stick of RAM?

[WMCoolmon]

Yeah, but until I see some way to fix it, or get a nice, new, 512 MB stick, I'm not going to be messing around with the memory.

[phatosealpha]

Hm.  A64's can be a be of a pain.   If it's a 939, then you probably would've wanted them to not be on the same channel, or you might've had issues.  Either way, might want to take a look at your mobo manual, or try different slots.  My Neo2 Platinum gets errors if I put my RAM in the first two slots, for example.

[WMCoolmon]

Heh, it's mATX so there's *only* two memory slots total.