Black screen

[6th Element]

This is my pc's description:
model: acer aspire M5100 ( M5100 - AM5100-U5300A )
S/N: PTS870X05274802C532702
SNID: 74801134727
AMD athlon(tm) 64x2 dual core processor 4400+ 2.30GHz
I added a thermaltake TR2-550W power supply
and running a GeForce9600Gt graphics card
the pc came with 2 gigs ram. I tried adding another 2 gigs but screen came up black during restart. After doing reasearch and running a performance test on crucial.com I found out I could put up to 8 gigs ram but I had to match up the cards, so I went out and bought 4x 2gig ram cards,... Screen went black... I reinstalled windows 64 bit, everything was ok, booted up and ran fine. Till I installed the latest version of the geforce software. When It rebooted after installation the screen went black again. I've been getting the runaround for months now,.. Some say my processor can't handle it when all the tests I perform tells me I can run 8 gigs. Another person told me my power supply wasn't capable of supporting the 8 gigs ( that's when I installed the newer 550w one. Some say it has to do with my graphics card when others say it has nothing to do with that... Now I'm stuck with 6 unused ram cards and a pc that only runs max at 3 gigs. I tried removing card by card, at 4 gigs I get a picture but sound is really static, at 3 gigs my pc runs perfect.. But anything more then 3 gigs and something doesn't work,... Pls help

motherboard serial# is M/B MBS870900174702A67EK02

thanks for you time!!

 

[holdum323]

Hi! Sounds to me like your problem is the RAM. If Crucial says you can run 8 Gigs, it should work. If you think you need 8 Gigs, maybe two 4 Gigs It seems like you have tried every thing and adding more RAM is what's causing you a problem. Where did you get the 4 sticks?

 

[Cycloid Torus]

In the past, I have had similar...
- once it was a piece of wire clipping in one of the memory slots - inspect with strong light and magnification
- once it was RAM voltage - the RAM needed slightly higher voltage (one-tenth of a volt) to run all 4 when I upgraded (auto was a fool)
- once it was a bad slot
- a couple of times I bought the wrong memory
- many times, I put something in but not all the way

I would download mobo manual (if possible) or the system manual and then check the Qualified Vendor List (QVL) for memory and configuration - make sure that 4 sticks of what you have is supposed to work

Also, slight possibility that you need to upgrade BIOS, so check that too.