More details will come after my next shot at the machine Friday evening. However, the memory question was raised by a network administrator for Chase Bank where the owner of this machine works and who is a friend of their's. Considering it was an XP machine running on 256 MB total memory with a 40GB hard drive, both upgrades were reasonable today anyway. As for it's validity, we can only wait to see, anyone got a good test bed to load and test those modules in???
I agree that in the normal case of things, the moving parts are the most likely to fail and the owner has decided to replace the hard drive as well. If all goes well, it will become the second hard drive in the machine. If not, it will be trashed, or recycled if you prefer. The graphics card could still be the issue as that was the first signal of a problem on the reload. As soon as the specific drivers were loaded for it, the wonderful BSOD started showing up and was only avoided by disabling that graphics card.
And for those that want all the potential reasons for memory or chips to fail, they have recently suffered a power failure after one of the storms this past year. I believe their power failure was due to a tree breaking a line (if I remember correctly) so I do not know the extent of any possible surges suffered by the machine.
Missing Drivers???? We were using the OEM provided recovery CD's. If there is a discrepency somewhere, I will check on my next attempt since I have now taken the service tag back to the manufacturer's web site to get a full report of the installed hardware.
For performance, memory usually does help with Windoze. Especially if one starts with a machine built to meet their minimum requirements. Adding an extra couple GB to my machine helped as well. Just can't go the final run to 8 GB since XP won't recognize all of it. I rarely blame it for malfunctions, but do recognize it for performance not only as an easy upgrade, but usually effective considering how most machines are sold, minimum price equals minimum equipment. For those old enough to remember, adding memory was not always easy. I remember adding it chip by chip to a full sized expansion card before plugging that card into an old AT clone. LOL
Anyway, wish me luck, next shot will be on Friday night with a new HD to install and new memory to get the machine past minimum. Hopefully the graphics card will not be the big problem. I'm still hoping it was the recalcitrant HD that required repartitioning as well as reformatting and the new one will work.
And for those who laughed, I will say it again BOOBS! For the ladies, sorry, we are geeks after all.
Jim. larry wrote:
Please be more pacific. On the surface, it just sounds like missing drivers.I have never, during the thousands of reloads I have done, seen a "memory issue hiding behind something else." Outside of physically abused machines, I have only ever seen two or three actual bad memory modules.My experience is that most people tend to focus on memory for performance and malfunction issues because, it is the one thing they actually know how to remove and re-insert.Items with moving parts are about 10,000 times more likely to fail... Aidan Artos MacTyre wrote:Even the format and reload failed. Errors were encountered dealing with the graphics card drivers, NVidea, and the HD. With 256 MB of memory, Windoze remember?, it was crawling anyway. Suggestion was made that it might be a memory issue hiding behind HD and Graphics errors. Any comments on that?
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