(Picture courtesy of The Brothers Root Blog)
Recently I noticed, when returning home after a long day, or waking up in the morning, that the display on my Dell Dimension 8400 desktop was black. I tried changing the display type, changing between DVI and VGA cable, powering the monitor off and back on. Northing worked. I had to turn the computer off completely, then back on. Even that was problematic. Being impatient, I turned the computer back on within seconds of it turning off. The computer would go into an infinite loop of reboots. I learned that I had to keep the computer off for about 30 seconds before turning it back on. That at least worked to get back to Windows … until the next crash.
Eventually I witnessed a crash rather than discovering it after the fact. There was a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). However, the BSOD only appeared briefly. Then back to the Black Screen of Death. Black and Blue about summed up how I felt.
I googled the symptoms. The results pointed to the video card. This confirmed my suspicions. Often a BSOD is caused by a bad video driver. Additionally, I told you in Improving My Vista Experience that I “upgraded” my video card to ATI/AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT. Good ideas, like good deeds, are duly punished. Additionally, ATI/AMD’s Vista (the OS of my desktop) drivers are infamous for being as stable as Charles Manson on crack.
But it turns out the culprit wasn’t the video card. Instead, I had some bad RAM. Actually, my RAM hasn’t changed since I upgraded my RAM about 7 months ago as reported in Improving My Vista Experience. So I guess my RAM went bad.
How did I discover this? I went through the Event Viewer and examined the errors. There were a lot of them. Some led me down false trails. But one consistent one was: “The hardware has reported an uncorrectable memory error. Event ID 1801.” Googling that, the two principal culprits were the BIOS and the RAM. I quickly eliminated the BIOS as the culprit. That left testing my RAM.
I used Vista’s built-in Memory Diagnostics Tool. I also used three free third-party tools, Memtest86, its new and improved version, Memtest86+, and MemScope. All reported errors.
RAM, unlike time, is cheap, so I just replaced all of the RAM with “genuine” Dell RAM. Problem solved. Though not before many hours of troubleshooting. What do “normal” people without tech skills do?
yeah ram is important, i love to play games so i have ti use a fast and reliable memory so i bought 4 gigs of dd3 fatality memory which runs at 1333 mhz, it doesn’t matter what you use your pc for in our state a cooling system is a must, during hot days a temp of my graphics and cpu went over 90c, so i installed a water cooling system and h20 air cooling system from dell which i know low, temp doesn’t go over 30c, so better keep your pc cool unless you want it to melt
Good point on a cooling system. Actually, in my bad RAM situation, I did use some software to see if overheating was an issue. It wasn’t this time, but there are other situations where it is.