Bios freeze question

[jon_hayhoe]

i was recently browsing the net when i got a blue screen of death, and upon restart it wouldnt stop freezing in bios. Someone told me to check my RAM, so i took it out and reseated both sticks. Didn't help. I removed a 2 gig stick and it booted up just fine for a few days and again a bsod and a froze bios. I tryed reseating the one stick it didnt work. I moved the stick and it booted right up, worked for a few days and bsod.

what this is telling me is that the same stick will work for a few days and then will no longer become useable in the the memory slot.

So is it the mobo or the ram?

Someone also said something about clearing CMOS.

I have a older d915gux intel mobo, p4 3.0ghz, 8600gt 512mb gpu, 2x 2gig sticks of ram(memoryPOWER 2gb 667 ddr2), 2x 500 gb hd's, windows xp

 

[Mongox]

Find your motherboard manual - it'll explain how to Clear the CMOS. The CMOS consists of the settings you change in the BIOS. It could be that something there is messed up. Usually clearing it involves turning off the computer, opening the case, grounding yourself and unpluging the power supply, then moving a tiny "jumper" into another position and then back again. The mb manual can be downloaded at Intel's site if you don't have it.

Also check in your manual about where the 1st and 2nd module of RAM should be located. Verify you're using those slots. If the manual says you can use other slots when only using 2 modules, try those two.

To find out if your RAM is indeed not working, you need to run a memory test on it. Try the test first, overnight, on both sticks together. If you get an error, then try one at a time. This won't rule out the motherboard being the fault, but gets you closer. If the RAM fails in the primary two slots, test in the other two, see above.

Memtest86 requires a blank diskette and this program, which will format the disk and install onto it. Then you boot from the disk. You can find this program all over or at the link below. You want version 3.5 or 4.0
http://www.hcidesign.com/memtest/MemTest.zip

 

[fatsauce]

or take the CMOS battery out wait for a minute then put it back in