A Funny Thing Happened To Me This Afternoon...

Today was ment to be a good day- I had just screened (along with a few of my classmates) a 12.5min documentry, and was recieved by applause from my peers and criticism from my lecturer.

So, while I was on a high- decided to perform that 7v Mod I had been planning to do for ages (my first ) and it was fine, but I decided not to use it as there isn't any need for that fan... yet! Need to cut a hole into my Case before I can use it yet.

And while I was inside my little rig- I decided to tuck a few wires into a crevice I had just seen, half an inch between my DVD drive and the top of the case, after doing this I looked at my RAM- just to see if there was anything odd about them... And i noticed that my configuration was a bit odd, so I took them out and compared them- There was 2 large(ish) sticks of 128mb and two smaller sticks with no values to them.

I put everything back where it was and booted- NOTHING, no beeps, no lights inside or outside the box, no buzzing of hard-drives, no whirring of fans. Needless to say- I was close to needing a clean pair of pants .
I unplugged all the power cables to everything, prayed that the god of electrical shocks was in the pub or otherwise preoccupied- and plugged the power cables into the Mobo again, the ATX plug was inserted and the four LED's on the4 Mobo flashed or a split second (who forgot to turn the PSU off at the switch?)

So the power WAS going into places it should do- so I hold my breath, cross my fingers and press my power button ClIck..Whirrrrrr /\/\// BEEEEEEEEEEEEP.....................BEEEEEEEEEEEEP.....................BEEEEEEEEEEEEP

The four lights on my Mobo were (left to right) Green, Green, Green, Red. And a high pitched beep for 4seconds with 3 second intervals. And just as I was about to scream the room down, my 'darling lady' ( I love her really) came in, took one look at all the parts and cables trailing from my case, now placed on its side, and screamed for me "What The F*** Are You Doing To That Damn Computer!!?", this was just as I turned on the power again and was greeted with a now-familiar "Beeep...Beeep...Beep...". Then it hit me- something I learned in this place when anything goes wrong... take out everything and put it all back in, and then, as I took the ATX plug out from my annoying, green board for the second time- there it was, staring me in the face....

THAT DAMN RAM STICK THAT I PUT BACK WASNT IN PROPERLY

Even my g/f knows that is a stupid mistake... and took great pleasure in telling me this- in great detail!

The Story of this little tale- If you take something out of your PC- make sure its put back properly and if you think you haven’t.. DON'T LET THE GIRLFRIEND FIND OUT WHAT YOU FORGOT TO DO!!

But I have a couple of questions arising from today’s experience too-

1) Why (if the memory wasn’t seated properly) would the PC fail to start AT ALL?
2) What are two small sticks of RAM? I have two large sticks totalling 255mb (what everything says I have) so what are the small ones for?
3) Is there a manual or something for the LED's and Beep combinations flying about somewhere? It's not in the Motherboard Manual- I'm looking through the MSI website now but found nothing yet.

Feel free to shout silly comments at me for making such a fundamental mistake, and if you can answer a few of my questions then all the better.

Thanks... T.Toy

im not sure about the beep codes, my msi boards seem to rely on the leds As to what g g g r is, according to my board 6182 it's boot attempt, but this would be far to far in to account for the problems you had. I'm surprised your manual doesnt have the codes listed, some boards have the led codes printed on them down by the PCI slots.