- Joined
- Jan 17, 2004
- Location
- Scarsdale, NY
A person much stupider than I told my friend to add a 1Gb stick of PC3200 DDR2 into his Dell Dimension 4500. (It obviously fit.) He already had a 512Mb stick of DDR that came with the computer.
He tried to boot it, and it didn't POST; the beep code indicated that he should reseat his memory. So, he tried reseating it, but that didn't do anything, so he removed the new RAM and tried it with just the old RAM, but he got the same beep code.
Next, he chatted with a Dell representative online. He told the representative what had happened, but the representative just recommended that he take apart everything and put it back together. He didn't try that, but I doubt that would have fixed anything. I lent him a computer after this happened, and he didn't touch the old computer.
The idiot put the DDR2 into his computer, and the computer worked fine. This isn't surprising as his computer supports DDR2.
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Just today, my friend took the hard drive from the broken computer and put it in that one I had lent him, which was coincidentially also a Dimension 4500 that I had found on the street. When he turned the computer on, he heard what sounded sort of like a fan hitting a cable andthe hard drive started smoking. He couldn't see anything burning, but he smelled the hard drive afterwards.
He removed the stinky hard drive from his computer, which had been the slave on the IDE cable, and BIOS didn't detect the normal-smelling hard drive after this. This is when he told me about it.
To determine what had broken, I switched the optical drives's and hard drive's IDE cables' headers. The hard drive still weren't detected work, and the optical drives still were. Therefore, it was not the headers on the motherboard that were the problem. We took a working IDE cable from another computer and switched that with the one attached to the hard drive, but the hard drive was still not detected. The computer was still making that fan-hitting-wire noise.
Considering it was making that noise, I'm thinking it was probably the hard drive that broke somehow. For some reason I didn't think of this when I was at his house.
So, here's what I'm wondering:
1. Are these two events related?
2. Is there a way I can fix any of them?
3. What normally happens when someone puts DDR2 into a DDR slot?
EDIT: I changed "3. What normally happens when someone puts 184-pin DDR2 into a DDR slot?" to "3. What normally happens when someone puts DDR2 into a DDR slot?" so people wouldn't have to read the whole thread to figure out that I figured out that 184-pin DDR2 doesn't exist.
He tried to boot it, and it didn't POST; the beep code indicated that he should reseat his memory. So, he tried reseating it, but that didn't do anything, so he removed the new RAM and tried it with just the old RAM, but he got the same beep code.
Next, he chatted with a Dell representative online. He told the representative what had happened, but the representative just recommended that he take apart everything and put it back together. He didn't try that, but I doubt that would have fixed anything. I lent him a computer after this happened, and he didn't touch the old computer.
The idiot put the DDR2 into his computer, and the computer worked fine. This isn't surprising as his computer supports DDR2.
---------------
Just today, my friend took the hard drive from the broken computer and put it in that one I had lent him, which was coincidentially also a Dimension 4500 that I had found on the street. When he turned the computer on, he heard what sounded sort of like a fan hitting a cable andthe hard drive started smoking. He couldn't see anything burning, but he smelled the hard drive afterwards.
He removed the stinky hard drive from his computer, which had been the slave on the IDE cable, and BIOS didn't detect the normal-smelling hard drive after this. This is when he told me about it.
To determine what had broken, I switched the optical drives's and hard drive's IDE cables' headers. The hard drive still weren't detected work, and the optical drives still were. Therefore, it was not the headers on the motherboard that were the problem. We took a working IDE cable from another computer and switched that with the one attached to the hard drive, but the hard drive was still not detected. The computer was still making that fan-hitting-wire noise.
Considering it was making that noise, I'm thinking it was probably the hard drive that broke somehow. For some reason I didn't think of this when I was at his house.
So, here's what I'm wondering:
1. Are these two events related?
2. Is there a way I can fix any of them?
3. What normally happens when someone puts DDR2 into a DDR slot?
EDIT: I changed "3. What normally happens when someone puts 184-pin DDR2 into a DDR slot?" to "3. What normally happens when someone puts DDR2 into a DDR slot?" so people wouldn't have to read the whole thread to figure out that I figured out that 184-pin DDR2 doesn't exist.
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