Need some help please

[Kolamer]

Yesterday I bought a stick of Kingston PC2700 512 DDR for my computer. I am running a Dell Dimension 4600 series with Win XP home on it. The computer had 2 sticks of 256 in it, so when I replaced on chip with the 512, that should put me at 768 ram.

Well, when I put in the new stick, BIOS tells me that the systems amount of ram has changed (good it knows it has more). I get to the login in screen for windows, I put in my PW to login, then windows crashes and gives me the blue screen.

I take the new chip out, put the old one back in, and it is running just fine. Anyone have any idea what is going on here?

Please help!

[Kolamer]

I said Kingston up top, it should have been Legacy Electornics Inc is the maker of the RAM. Anyone know what I can/should do?

Should I take it back and exchange it for another one?

[nicknomo]

Well, Dell's BIOS's are anemic, so normally I'd say to raise latency timings but I'm not sure that's possible with Dell's.

First, what type of ram did you have in there already? PC 2700/DDR 333?
How many memory slots are there? Where do you have the sticks situated? which one is closest to the cpu? (It might serve you well to try switching them).
What options for memory do you have in the BIOS?

You may also want to see if the new stick functions on its own.

You can try a memtest.. Get a clean floppy and download it here
http://www.memtest86.com/
I'm guessing that you'd fail it though...

If you have the option to take it back and get a name brand though, I'd reccommend that. A lot of these generic sticks have all sorts of issues.

You could have a bad stick, a compatability issue or just that automatic timings that are two tight when using different sticks. Name brands tend to help avoid these issues, but sometimes they suffer from the same symptoms.

[Kolamer]

The type of ram that is in there now are 2 sticks of 256 PC2700 DDR. There are 4 memory slots in the computer, 2 for DDR and 2 for SDRAM. One of the DDR slots is closest to the CPU.

[nicknomo]

What about BIOS options? What do you got in there for memory adjustment?

and have you tried with just the new stick?