Hi

My mate brought home some memory from an old Dell PC at his work and tried to fit it to his Emachines PC. The memory fitted inside the case but when he came to switch it on, the PC just kept beeping and nothing came on his monitor.
He then switched the PC off, removed the said memory and switched the PC back on to be greeted with error messages on boot up (don't know what they were).
After a night unplugged, the PC would then not show the correct time and the bios settings (or Cmos) kept returning to default due to the battery being dead. The battery was fine before he added the memory.

Anyways, long story short, he reinstalled Windows using the restore discs that came with the PC and changed the battery inside the PC and everything seems to be almost back to normal except the windows update site freezes his PC everytime now and the PC seems to be running slower than it did before! Also, there are times when it won't recognise the second DVDRW drive which is inbuilt into the PC (but sometimes it does). For an off-the-shelf PC, it was a fast little bugger before this happened.

Can anyone shed any light on what could have happened?

Thanks .. sPaCe

Most likely he has mismatched memory and they're not running at the correct speed. I.e. the memory he put in is slower so it freaked out when you told it to run that fast. Reseting the bios will have reset everything and forced it to a lower speed.

I think.

Did he earth himself when he installed the ram ? . I learned the hard way by not earthing myself once and blew a motherboard which in turn fried the cpu . I was only cleaning the dust away at the time . But static discharge is a killer for pc's .

Thanks for that. It makes sense. Any ideas on how to reset the Bios to the original manu spec?

Thanks

Did he earth himself when he installed the ram ? . I learned the hard way by not earthing myself once and blew a motherboard which in turn fried the cpu . I was only cleaning the dust away at the time . But static discharge is a killer for pc's .

I think he has one of those wrist band things to do that but not sure... The mobo looks like its ok though because its working now just seems a little slower than before..

There should be an option in the bios to load optomised settings

Hi

My mate brought home some memory from an old Dell PC at his work and tried to fit it to his Emachines PC. The memory fitted inside the case but when he came to switch it on, the PC just kept beeping and nothing came on his monitor.
He then switched the PC off, removed the said memory and switched the PC back on to be greeted with error messages on boot up (don't know what they were).
After a night unplugged, the PC would then not show the correct time and the bios settings (or Cmos) kept returning to default due to the battery being dead. The battery was fine before he added the memory.

Anyways, long story short, he reinstalled Windows using the restore discs that came with the PC and changed the battery inside the PC and everything seems to be almost back to normal except the windows update site freezes his PC everytime now and the PC seems to be running slower than it did before! Also, there are times when it won't recognise the second DVDRW drive which is inbuilt into the PC (but sometimes it does). For a cheapish PC, it was a fast little bugger before this happened.

Can anyone shed any light on what could have happened?

Thanks .. sPaCe

The dreaded dell memory....... :confused:

Is there anything particular about the dell mem he got ?

Did he take full ESD precautions (ie anti static) ?

Pc's can be odd (i had some serious issues just last night) best thing is completely clear the cmos and reset to defaults, you may need to read the manual but removing mains and the cmos bat then turning on will probably clear it. If the battery is flat prb 50p for a CR2032 3v lithium.

You may need to read the manual for a CMOS reset (maybe a jumper on the motherboard)

Once done test it, maybe CPU needs to be set correctly in the BIOS.

:thumbsup:

Will tell him to try that... many thanks all!

He did replace the Cmos battery with the 2032 lithium and it got rid of the errors so the battery was part of the fault but the memory he fitted seemed to kill the battery in the first place.... Weird!