Only Boots Sometimes

[llacher]

Hi everyone. I recently bought a dell 518 and it has been giving me trouble. The heart of the issue is that I believe there is an issue with the RAM slots but I may be wrong. Only sometimes does the cpu boot and thats if Im lucky. Most of the time i get the 2 second spin and then nothing. I can seat a 1gb stick of ram and it will boot and then take it out and reinsert it and it will no longer boot. So far any attempt at using any slot combinations besides just slot 1 have been failures. I think there may be a short in the RAM threads but idk, have never had this happen before. Also, trying to fix this on a budget so if there are ways of fixing this without simply buying a new board please let me know. Thanks,
Logan

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

It could also be PSU related. If you have another available to test with it would help, but double check it isn't one of those old Dell proprietary models.

 

[llacher]

It could also be PSU related. If you have another available to test with it would help, but double check it isn't one of those old Dell proprietary models.

I replaced the psu when i got it with another i know works. This issue was known by the previous owner so i tried to rule out as many things as i could. Is it possible to fix this if its a ram slot problem? Besides buying a new mobo that is