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memory problems - ideas?

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garwain

Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2002
Location
Quebec, Canada
One of my clients has a computer that will take several tries to boot. After watching this I've seen that the first couple of boots, the machine won't count the ram correctly.First boothad 39 kb , second 49 mb and last two 97 mb. The 97mb is the correct count. Any ideas as to why it dies the first couple times? The machine will crash before it gets into windows until about the 4th boot.

My first though a bad memory chip, but I would think it would always stop at the same point if that was the case. This is an old P166 running with 2 16mb EDO and a 63mb sdram.

Any ideas as to what the problem might be?
 
It could be a bad stick of memory or possibly the simm slot is broken?? Tell your client to get a new computer because a P166 is very slow.;)
 
63mb??? I have never seen a stick with that amount before. To me it sounds like the ram is not properly seated. As memory, or anything for that matter heats up it expands. Those extra boots could be because the memory takes that long to properly seat itself. I know it sounds stupid, but i swear this can happen. Try a single stick of ram in the machine and see if that solves the problem. At the very least it could help isolate the bad stick of ram if that is the case. But upgrading to at least something that run pc133 would not be a bad idea either.
 
I had an old socket7 soyo mobo that takes both simms and dimms but you cant use both together its just one or the other b/c of the faster access times of the sdram. Try pulling the EDO first then see if it boots up properly. If that doesn't work then pull the sdram and boot with the EDO.

Also check your bios settings to make sure they are correct.
 
The motherboard is an ASUS board that does support both simms and dimms. I have the same model on one of my older machines, and have it working fine under the same ammount of memory. This problem machine has also worked fine for over a year like this.

I have already re-seated the three memory chips, and when I was looking at it, it booted fine the first time. The numbers I posted were sent to me by my client. I'll be going back saturday, and I'll try temporarly removing the older memory and see if the machine works fine like that.
 
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