Hey all,
Surfed into the forum from Google as I'm really at a loss over this. I recently upgraded the RAM from 256MB to 512MB by adding another 256MB PC133 SDRAM chip. I also formatted and reinstalled all drivers/programs. But now, after about 2 hours of using the computer, the system locks intermittantly, locking up for about 2 seconds then releasing again. It starts doing this every 30 seconds or so. If I leave it, the time it locks becomes worse and it does it more often. If I try to move the mouse or type while it's locked, the internal speaker squeaks like crazy at me just before it unlocks. After restarting it works pefectly again for the next few hours.

Windows detects the new RAM and says I have 512mb. I didn't enable it in BIOS or anything as it seemed to pick it up automatically. I checked that the motherboard was compatible with it before buying, and thought it was. Another thing worth noting is the second hard drive that I had, its partition table corrupted when I formatted so I disabled it in BIOS. What could be causing the freezing? Any help would be *greatly* appriciated, thanks!

Win98SE, 512mb ram, 1.05Ghz athlon XP, 80GB HD (+40gb HD not in use)

Hello, and Welcome to D-A-L.

What motherboard do you have?

Download and run Memtest86.

http://www.memtest86.com/

(The file you want: )
http://www.memtest86.com/memt32.zip


Use the downloaded file to create a bootdisk on one of your floppies. When complete, you won't see any files on the floppy, but they are there. Just boot the machine with this floppy and run it as long as you can afford to. If there are errors, run it on one memory module at a time to narrow down the possibilities. (ie; Remove all but one module.) You may have to set your bios boot device sequence to boot from the floppy drive first.

Hey Dan, thanks for the reply. I have an ECS K7S5A, and I recently downloaded SiSoftware SANDRA. It says the RAM is 256MB DIMM SDRAM Single-Bank, the old RAM chip was the same except that is Double-Bank.

I've let Memtest run two passes through the RAM, but it found no problems. (I also tried Microsoft's memory testing program, but that found nothing either...) Any other suggestions? Thanks!
(Just in case, I'm going to do a surface scan on the hard disk today to see whether that's causing the trouble!)

Originally Posted by Dan Penny

Hello, and Welcome to D-A-L.

What motherboard do you have?

Download and run Memtest86.

http://www.memtest86.com/

(The file you want: )
http://www.memtest86.com/memt32.zip


Use the downloaded file to create a bootdisk on one of your floppies. When complete, you won't see any files on the floppy, but they are there. Just boot the machine with this floppy and run it as long as you can afford to. If there are errors, run it on one memory module at a time to narrow down the possibilities. (ie; Remove all but one module.) You may have to set your bios boot device sequence to boot from the floppy drive first.

Have a look at this:

http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/ecs/...LESHOOTING.htm

which is from:

http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/ecs/k7s5aguide/