Question If one stick of ram is bad will the system keep operating?

indianajune1

Reputable
Jul 31, 2018
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Sup guys , having problems with my laptop crashing and turning off. Thought it was the power brick but check with a multi meter and it’s not. Noticed the other day the screen turns blue before it powers off so I thought it might be ram but you can not easily remove the ram in this model. However you can easily upgrade to more by a hatch on the bottom. So I’m wondering if ram is the problem will adding more fix it, or will one bad apple ruin the bunch ?
 
If it has soldered in memory that is not removable, and IF that memory is the problem, then that's pretty much it for that system because that is the memory the system is going to primarily use first or at least equally and there is likely no way to "disable" the onboard memory in favor of any memory you install, BUT if you already have other compatible memory or can borrow some it might be worth trying because you never know, might get lucky. Chances are good though that even if you do you might see lots of errors or other issues because it likely will still try to use that soldered memory anyhow.
 
And, there are a hell of a lot of other reasons why you might get a bluescreen and then a shut down that are not memory related. If the system is unusable anyhow, which it sounds like it is, then I'd suggest trying a clean install of Windows and assuming you have anything important already backed up elsewhere (And if you don't, well, then let this be a learning experience for you because you should ALWAYS have EVERYTHING you can't stand to lose saved to more than one distinctly separate location so that if something happens, which it always does sooner or later, you don't lose it. Real life isn't the movies and recovery of data from dead or dying hardware is rarely ever realistically accomplished even by most labs.) it might just be a simple matter of doing a fresh install. If you have a different version of Windows I can provide a link to the instructions on doing a clean install for that as well.