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Maybe the contacts on your memory are dirty and physically taking them out and putting back in again is temporarily giving you a cleaner contact again. Maybe clean the contacts and see? I don't know, but all I can think of. Since just taking them out and putting them back in immediately doesn't hint at a temperature problem.

 

My wife's acer burns my legs off but it's not overheating.

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Unfortunately laptops are very hard to debug (you cant just swap out parts and test them in a different PC) so I don't know what else to suggest, but I think (as you have tried different memory modules already) you might have a motherboard problem (north bridge/memory controller).

 

Is the RAM shared for the graphics chip too? (as they ususally are in laptops)

That would explain the flickery dots on the screen that you see when it fails to boot.

 

I guess your choice is, try to live with it, or find a repair centre that doesn't charge so much that you would rather buy a new one (and more importantly gives you a free estimate first!), or buy a new laptop (will be much faster too)!

 

You can always sell your old laptop on ebay for spares, you will be surprised how much some people will pay for it (for example someone who cracked his screen and is looking for a replacement).

Edited by tux99
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To me it sounds like a bad/corroded contact in the RAM slot.

Pulling out the RAM then reinserting it would clean the surface of the connector allowing contact but soon the corrosion would once again disconnect that contact.

 

Ken

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@daniewicz, what did you mean about CMOS? I've no real idea what CMOS is or how it could go bad or what the effect of it going bad would be... or how I would clear it given that it's a laptop and I've never opened the guts of it. Would CMOS failure/corruption be consistent with the weird RAM fix?

 

If you clear your CMOS, you will reset the BIOS and start fresh with the defaults. On a desktop motherboard there is a switch to clear the CMOS. Another way to clear the CMOS is to remove the motherboard battery for a few minutes and then reattach it. Do you know where your battery is located?

 

CMOS corruption is consistent with many kinds of hardware glitches. It is something I always try first because it is easy (on a desktop).

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Normally I would agree but when it happens several times in one day, it doesn't have any time to corrode between spasms. And if the contacts were that damaged then I'd expect the remove/replace trick to not work at least once...

 

Yes, the RAM is shared, and no I can't live with it, it's driving me potty.

If it's the motherboard then the laptop's presumably a write-off, but if it's contacts I guess cleaning them should be possible. It would have to be the laptop's contacts though, because the same happened to the brand new memory. And all the contacts I can see look pristine.

 

Here's another data point - with two 512 MB sticks in, it was happy for a while, then switched itself off. I removed one of the sticks, but didn't touch the other one. Then it booted. Yeah I know it doesn't discount the contacts theory but if it couldn't get a contact with the second stick any more then it should just ignore it and run with the other one. I guess.

 

Thanks for all the ideas, guys! :thumbs:

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Considering that the cmos battery is not recharged, if the Battery is quite old it could simply be on its lasts legs. After all they do not last forever. :)

They are dirt cheap anyway and it would do no harm to replace it.

 

 

 

Cheers. John.

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if your laptop has 2 slots to put ram you should put the bigger ram into the inner slot...the other should be used by the smallest that way you can guarantee the voltage and amperage to that ram, I'm also assuming you have checked the frequency....the CMOS battery is a good idea to remove some corrupted files as daniewicz said above...nice one daniewicz, I forgot completely...

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My Toshiba that I've had for four years doesn't have a battery. It has something on the board that is charged up when you use it, probably a capacitor. If I leave it and don't use it for a month or something like this, it's completely discharged. And so, I have to enter date/time again, etc.

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That's it. That could be three coin batteries or three capacitors to hold the CMOS data while you change the main battery.

yep those are batteries (seems connected in parallel) I don't think it could be capacitors cuz capacitors cannot hold on the energy without a source...they just need "ms" (milliseconds) to discharge...they are usually used to avoid damages when sources are removed (sources = batteries, current sources, voltage sources,...)maybe if you remove it...or try to leave it sometime it will discharge and reset the values/settings to default....also try the trick I said before (put the bigger ram in the inner slot)...

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