Adding RAM

[Mellow]

I currently have 2x256MB RAM sticks and I thought I would upgrade by buying 2x512MB of RAM. But when I try to add them into the 2 free slots and power up my PC nothing happens.

Nothing ever goes smoothly

(WinXP btw)

 

[smurkin]

well...make sure you push them all the way home so that the side clips snap (maybe wrong choice of words) into place. Pull out the old ram, and just try the new in the same holes. Also, try to match the RAM in each bank...there are probably 4 slots...two banks.

Failing that, post the RAM types and mobo. We need that info.

 

[Jimmae]

you might have a mobo with 2 DDR slots and 2 SD-RAM slots, trying to fill all 4 with DDR would indeed make things go boom.

put the 2 new sticks in place of 2 old ones and see if that works.

 

[TheJkWhoSaysNi]

If your motherboard supports dual channel you'll need the correct sizes in the correct places, on mine 1 and 3 need to be the same, as do 2 and 4.

 

[Mellow]

If your motherboard supports dual channel you'll need the correct sizes in the correct places, on mine 1 and 3 need to be the same, as do 2 and 4.

Yes the current RAM is in 1 and 3, so I put the two new sticks into 2 and 4 but that didn't help.

 

[Mellow]

you might have a mobo with 2 DDR slots and 2 SD-RAM slots, trying to fill all 4 with DDR would indeed make things go boom.

put the 2 new sticks in place of 2 old ones and see if that works.

How do I find out what type of slots they are?

 

[JBP|]

erm i could be wrong but i dont think DDR ram would fit into an SD ram slot anyway

 

[Ardrias]

It wouldnt. Well, not without a sledgehammer or some such.

Did you reset BIOS before trying to boot? If you've set such things as CAS latency manually, there's a good chance it wont boot if you add ram that doesnt support those settings.

Best thing to do is to just add one by one.

 

[Xavier]

DDR is keyed differently to SDR, not to mention having a different pin count, so yes, it wouldn't fit.

First thing we should really know is the specific model of motherboard, secondly the BIOS revision it's running wouldn't hurt.

Also, have you tried removing the existing DIMMS and fitting the new pair into slots one and three on their own? Some dual channel setups need to have the larger DIMMS in pair 0 (slots 1 and 3) and the smaller sticks in pair 1.

CAS latency is possible, but if it's all DDR400 at stock speeds it would only cause instability, not a total failure to POST, well not unless it was really shoddy.