Fujistu Siemens shows blank screen upon RAM upgrade

[seshadri]

Hi Techies,
I have a Fujitsu Siemens M6450 that came with 512MB(2X256 DDR2) of RAM and I was totally unsatisfied with it. So I decided to upgrade it to 1GB at least. I was successful in doing so at first when I put in a 1GB(CORSAIR 667MZ) in one slot and 256MB in another to make it 1.23GB of RAM. It worked fine for a while much to my excitement but a week later, I connected it to my computer to my TV and extended the Desktop to use the TV as my second screen and after a while it just froze with a cracking sound. Then I was left with no choice but to shut it down forcefully, but after that it would not boot up, the lights come up but no screen display or any other activity.
Luckily, I replaced it with my old RAMs and it works fine even though unsatisfactorily as before.

Kindly help, if anyone has any suggestions or solutions.

Thanks in advance,

Seshadri.

 

[raybay]

The crackling sound is hard to define here... but I expect taht one of the two memory modules failed... or something else, unrelated, failed.
Have you tried booting to just one module, then the other...
Having size imbalance on two memory modules is a stress for most motherboards, but not usually enough to cause a failure...
And of course, the failure could be unrelated to anything you did... But testing with other memory modules, perhaps borrowed ones, would be the first thing I would try.

 

[seshadri]

Thanks for the reply

Hi Raybay,
Subsequent to this post, today I tried to check if the RAM worked in another laptop and Voila !! it did. Then I changed the settings on my Fujitsu to not extend the windows desktop, and tried the 1GB RAM again and to my utter surprise, it works now. I am not sure i connecting to the external monitor caused an issue due to which it did not work, but I am now not sure if I should do that. Further, could you suggest to me, if I should also replace the other 256MB RAM with another 1GB RAM to make it more balanced. Would that help??? Please advice.

Thanks in advance,
Seshadri.

 

[raybay]

Performance will improve on many tasks... some computers misbehave badly when their memory is imbalanced in one way or another...
The good news is that it is working... be sure to watch that Fujitsu as it gets close to the end of warranty... do not delay to send it in if it misbehaves in any way.