Serial Killer RAM!?!?

Ok my neighbor is having have this interesting situation, and since he has no net access now, Im posting this...he HAD 2 boxes..

Abit BE6
Celeron 433
"SUSPECT" 128 MB ram
64 RAM
10 GB WestDig
sound, NIC, & vid
CDrom
250W supply

Acer V72ma
K6-2 500
128, 64 SDRAM
(2) 20 GB IBM
onboard sound & vid, NIC
CDrom
250W supply


Ok the deal is about a week ago, the Abit setup started having lockups & kernel errors, then hours later, OS would not boot, followed the next morning by not even posting, no bios, no nothing. Switched everything out from CPU all the to power supply, everything else ran fine on one of my boards. So concluded bad board.

Well in the Acer setup, he replace the 64 MB RAM chip with the "SUSPECT" 128 MB RAM chip from the Abit setup. It was running just fine about a week until today. Again, he got a kernel errors, followed by minutes later, "unable to read disk" errors when trying to boot...& now it just sits at the system info screen on power on...he can enter the bios still, but thats it. It will not do anything past that point. Again, switch out all pieces of hardware some of my old stuff, no change...so another bad board??..whats the odds of that??

The ONLY piece of hardware that was the same between 2 machines is that "SUSPECT" 128 MB chip. This chip doesnt cause problems in any of my machines. But of course I havent left it in for a week....has anyone ever heard of a RAM chip slowly killing a mainboard???

 

Not unless it had some bad internal circuitry that was shorting something out. Couldn't be a virus as once the power is gon the contents are wiped from memory. Take the suspect stick in to a PC shop and see if they have a tester they can put it on and burn it in for a day or so.

 

Those problems don't even come close to sounding like a memory chip problem. A memory chip is either functional or defective. They don't work for a while then fail, then work for a while in another system then fail. There's another common factor between the two systems...the user. These problems could be caused by viruses. They could also be caused by failing hardware. Neither system is new. It's possible the hard drives failed. I could think of a hundred potential problems, but none of them would include a bad memory chip.

 

"There's another common factor between the two systems...the user. These problems could be caused by viruses."

Well I thought of that as well, but the problem , is that the 2nd (Acer) box was reformatted & had just windows, and was sitting idle for weeks, no lan or internet connection, he was waiting until his wife return from overseas business to load whatever software she wanted on it, he only noticed because he plays solitaire on it,.....

"They could also be caused by failing hardware. Neither system is new. It's possible the hard drives failed."

Again, we tested all pieces of hardware on one of my boards, and everything works/worked fine, even the SUSPECT ram, but like I said before, seeing how it was the only piece of hardware to come in contact with both mainboards...I wasnt about to let it stay in mine.

"My advice is go to housecalls & run the free online virus scanner. "

I dont see how this is going to do any good if one board doesnt even post and the other only post to the ram check and freezes, explain how we are to virus check that?

 

We had that problem also, we had a bad 128 pc100 on an Abit BE6 and when we replaced it we were ok. WE did how ever reformat and reload the hard drive. After that it ran well for about a year then we had problems with the USP ports on the BE6, evertime we plugged in a usb item it would crash the computer. So we have since upgraded to a new mother board and processor. Our old BE6 had a PIII 450 on it.

Schwaby

 

Hi kdiddy, welcome to TSG....

Have you tried to see if it'll boot up with just the minimums (cpu, ram, video card, hard drive)?