Engreeks1

Hi There,

System specs:
Manufacturer: Dell
Processor: Intel q6600 2.4ghz
OS: Vista home premium (no sp1)
Ram: (this is the problem) corsair xms2 2x2gb ddr2
HD: 250gb
MoBo: Dell proprietary
AntiVirus: Symantec
PowerSupply: Dell 350watt

I just bought a new dell 530 with vista home premium (no service pack 1 yet) and tried to upgrade the ram. The system originally had 2x512mb modules which worked fine (except for the low quantity).

I bought some corsair xms2 2x2gb ddr2 modules to upgrade the system to 4gb of ram. Today, I took out the two old 512mb sticks and replaced them with two 2gb sticks, so the system now has 4gb of ram.

Unfortunately, when I started up the machine I ran into major problems. I have already tried replacing the new ram with the old ram, and the system works fine with the old ram. So, based on my limited knowledge of computers, I think the problem is with the new ram.

I've included a detailed description of everything I've done below, but basically windows will not startup with the new ram. I apologize in advance for the long-windedness of this post!


The first time I started up, i got past bios, and past the windows loading screen with the green bars that move left and right, but after that I got a black screen with just a mouse cursor. The system got stuck there.

I forced a restart by holding down the power button, and the next time windows made it past the login screen and onto the desktop. The mouse movement worked, but I couldn't click an anything, and that loading circle next the the mouse cursor would not go away. The keyboard windows key did not respond. I then tried ctrl-alt-dlt, which brought up a selection screen - I choose to launch task manager, and then the computer froze again.

I forced a restart again and this time I started up in safe-mode. I got stuck at that black screen with a cursor again, but this time after about 3 minutes the login screen loaded successfully. I was able to login and safemode seemed to be working properly, so I ran mdsched to test the ram. Mdsched restarted teh computer automatically, so I didn't actually get to see what the results were, but at 80% done there were no errors.

Do you know where I can access the mdsched log?

So thanks in advance for your help! Please let me know if you need any further information to help me out. It's really amazing that forums like this can exist for free!

Eric