Pc fan and heat sink cleaning gone wrong

[Dunkfunk]

My CPU fan was starting to get really noisy, so I figured it was having trouble blowing past all the dust and lint. upon inspection I found that the whole heat sink was covered in a solid piece of lint. Now I'm pretty good with computers. I've completely disassembled, upgraded and reassembled my laptop and it works fine (hence i'm able to post this). Even my PC was mostly built by me. So I took off the heat sink and the fan from the processor so that I could clean them.
The fan works great now, but the computer won't boot. It turns on for about 10 seconds displaying an intel logo and then crashes. Now I haven't reapplied the thermal paste to the CPU, but that should only affect it's ability to cool itself once running. it shouldn't prevent it from working at all.
So just to clarify. The CPU stayed in it's socket and separated from the adhesive paste on the heat sink.

Any idea on how to solve this would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Dunkfunk]

Nvm. I figured it out. While I had it open I decided to throw some extra ram in from one of my old computers. Which was dumb of me. I didn't even check to see if they were the same type. Not only were they different brands and sizes, but also type and speed as well. So I think that may have something to do with it, cause when I took that out then it worked. Either that or when removing the heat sink the cpu got jostled, cause to check for broken pins I removed the cpu, found none, and put it back properly. so that might have done the trick too. either way, it's all good now.