My laptop recently fried it's video card on me (thus resulting in it needing a new motherboard) and so here I am forced to use the "spare" computer.
I surf the Internet (which I can still do on the laptop) and I play WoW (which I cannot do on the laptop).
The spare computer is an emachines W3503. It uses standard 3200 DDR RAM, upgradable to 2GB. Additionally, I want to upgrade the video card (there is a PCI-E slot onboard), however I wanted to see if a RAM upgrade would suffice or at least to see how it ran with just a RAM upgrade. I realize this machine is not wonderful, and I don't want to put a lot of money in it, but it's all I can do at the present because I can't afford to go buy a new system or to pay the $400-600 to replace my laptop's motherboard.
So I went and bought two 1GB memory sticks. I get home and install it, power on the system and the monitor won't connect. The self test is all that shows on the monitor. I reseat the sticks, switch them around, run one in one slot alone, then switch, etc. etc. Finally I put the old craptastic 512 stick back in the thing and it powers up normally, monitor and all. Another thing I noticed when I had the new RAM installed was that the fan sounded like it was about to become airborne. It was NOT loud due to the cover being off alone, this was notable noise. The fan sounded normal, it was just really loud.
I really am not sure what is going on with it. I've heard of bad memory sticks being bad right out of the package, but what are the odds that TWO of them are?
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm about at my wits end with these machines.
I surf the Internet (which I can still do on the laptop) and I play WoW (which I cannot do on the laptop).
The spare computer is an emachines W3503. It uses standard 3200 DDR RAM, upgradable to 2GB. Additionally, I want to upgrade the video card (there is a PCI-E slot onboard), however I wanted to see if a RAM upgrade would suffice or at least to see how it ran with just a RAM upgrade. I realize this machine is not wonderful, and I don't want to put a lot of money in it, but it's all I can do at the present because I can't afford to go buy a new system or to pay the $400-600 to replace my laptop's motherboard.
So I went and bought two 1GB memory sticks. I get home and install it, power on the system and the monitor won't connect. The self test is all that shows on the monitor. I reseat the sticks, switch them around, run one in one slot alone, then switch, etc. etc. Finally I put the old craptastic 512 stick back in the thing and it powers up normally, monitor and all. Another thing I noticed when I had the new RAM installed was that the fan sounded like it was about to become airborne. It was NOT loud due to the cover being off alone, this was notable noise. The fan sounded normal, it was just really loud.
I really am not sure what is going on with it. I've heard of bad memory sticks being bad right out of the package, but what are the odds that TWO of them are?
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm about at my wits end with these machines.