Ram causing temp. startup freezing..?

S

Seboj

Geek Trainee
I just installed a stick of Kingston 512 ValueRam into my girl's HP Pavillion, along with the 256 it came with.

AMD Athlon XP 2800+
2.08 Ghz, 704 mb ram.

Now, at the boot screen, it freezes for a few seconds, and then freezes for a few more seconds at the logon screen. Any help on how to fix it? Or is it caused by something other than the ram?
 
To be honest, i couldn't tell you exactly why it's happening, but I CAN tell you that I'm almost positive that it has something to do with the ram not being "compatible" with eachother. Try taking one of them out (preferably the smaller one) boot up with just the one. Also, make sure that the specs of your RAM (IE: the Front side bus) matches with your bios. Let us know what happens.

*edit* Is it only temporarily freezing, or does it stay frozen?
 
It's only temporary. Lasts about 30 seconds or so on both screens.

I played around with it last night a bit. I used the 2 sticks of pc2700 256 that came with the HP, and a combo of 256 pc2100 and 512 ram which I know are compatible. The 512 works alone, and all the 256's work together just fine. It's only when I combine a 256 and 512 that it starts freezing.
 
They must run at different speeds or something. If you do have the money and still want to upgrade her system a bit, I would buy another stick of the same 512 and run those two together.... If you have the money :-)
 
Pfft, I have my own computer to work on. Let her pawn off the 3 256ers and buy her own ram :good:

As a side note, she said she didn't care about startup time, so I left the 256/512 combo in there. Earlier today the system froze, and I manually turned it off. It wouldn't turn back on, however. The fans and drives recieved power, but the comp acted like it was in sleep mode. I turned it off again, pulled the power cord, and when I plugged it back in, the comp started automatically, back into the sleep state. I then changed out the ram and it worked like normal again. Any thoughts?
 
I couldn't say exactly... When I was building my [now ex] girlfriend's computer, I had put two sticks of Kingston 512 in there- exact same ram. When I booted up, it would completely freeze at varying times... I tested it like crazy with memtest and everything.. in the end, it turned out that it would only run properly when I overclocked the system... in fact, everything ran completely stable when overclocked. Something about what the RAM ran at was weird.. not quite compatible with my mobo or cpu or something. My point is this: I just think that the stick of 512 and 256 isn't quite compatible, but almost is... close enough to boot sometimes, and randomly fail other times. So, as for why... I dont have a clue. Not that what I said helps even a little bit :P Actually, i'm really surprized that nobody else has said anything about this, since it's been up here for a couple days at least. Anyways, if somebody else does respond, I expect that they will have something more insightful to say about it. I'm just going off personal experience for this one. Best of luck to you though. Any progress- let me/us know. I'd like to know if you can figure out exactly what it is... Really, im sorry that I couldn't help more though.
 
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