DIYers IT Zone

In my previous post on add/remove laptop memory, we already know how to install memory. Now we move to troubleshoot ram/memory issue. We all know that RAM/Memory is one of the important components in PC system. If RAM problem, system will crashed or blue screen especially for Window-based PC.

To troubleshoot whether system crashed is caused by ram or not is not very hard.

First we see what is the ram faulty symptoms.

1. Beeps sound during POST or booting. This if often happen on faulty ram.
* Diffrent BIOS beeps code is vary. Example, AMI Bios ( 2/3/4 short beeps )

2. Random crash or blue screens during the installation/running of Windows OS.

3. System keep restart or fail to boot.

4. Crashes during memory intensive operations such as 3D games, benchmarks, compiling, photoshop and etc.

*Above symptoms only for reference only.

Secondly, we need to confirm that the ram is inserted properly on DIMMs and is in correct orders especially involving more than 1 ram. Some motherboard require different placing for different capacity modules.

Above attached a copy of DDR DIMM Type of Gigabytes motherboard. We can see from the table above, when user has a 512M ram, he need to insert it on DIMM1 or DIMM2 only ( depends on memory bank also ). If user has 2 x 256MB ram, then he need to insert on DIMM2 and DIMM3( depends on memory bank also ). Fail to do so will resulting motherboard cannot detect ram. So, always refer to your motherboard module when adding ram.

Thirdly, we isolate out which ram is causing problem. This applied to those system that having more than 1 ram. If your system has only 1 ram, then u can move to next step.

Lastly, we run some test to determine whether the ram problem or not. There are a lots of utilities available for ram testing, therefore i will just list some of it only.

Memtest86+ is thorough, stand alone memory test for computers. BIOS based memory tests are a quick, cursory check and often miss many of the failures that are detected by Memtest86.

My experience, i used Memtest86+ to detect a GEIL DDR ram faulty which caused system to keep restart.

DocMemory Diagnostic, an advanced self-bootable PC Memory Diagnostic Software is a user friendly software designed to capture all possible memory failures in PC.

Windows Memory Diagnostic, a tool for testing the Random Access Memory (RAM) on your computer for errors. The diagnostic includes a comprehensive set of memory tests.

For me, i uses to isolate out ram 1st before moving to testing. Because testing might take some time based on capacity.