Replacing a stick of ram

[roche28]

Hello everyone, so recently i had some problems with my pc, slow booting, freezing and 100% disk usage, and it turned out that my ram was to blame, because my pc went back to normal while using only one stick in either slot (i had 2x2 GB, only two ram slots on the motherboard), and the pc would give continuous beeping with just the faulty stick, meaning it's done for. Now i'm lookin to replace it, and since it's and old pc, i probably wont be able to find the exact same memory, the current memory is Kingston KVR800D2N5/2G and i found KVR800D2N6/2G, also 2 GB in my local shop, so can i use them together?

 

[brispuss]

Both modules are similar, but not exactly the same.

Good chance both modules will work together. But being individual memory modules, there is a possibility they might not work together, at least not initially. If they don't work right away, we can make some adjustments to settings in BIOS to help get them to work together if necessary.

 

[LowlySkeleton]

As brispuss had mentioned, these modules are fairly similar. However, even if the product ID is similar doesn't guarantee it will work well, especially since you never know when the manufacturer would have decided to go with a different brand of chips for to put onto their newer batch of PCBs. Though usually not possible if it is packaged, you would ideally want to check the serial numbers and brand on the actually chips on the PCBs to be more confident in their match.

However, this doesn't mean that they HAVE to be the same. Sometimes mix and matched modules of ram, as long as their specs are fairly similar, may actually work just fine with no errors seen even in Memtest. I would suggest that you run Memtest with the modules running together in dual channel (the same colored slots) and see how it goes. If you get no errors after 1 pass, you are pretty much off to the races.

And if you want to save a few bucks, its not a bad idea buying a matching set of ram second hand if its an older system (DDR2s and DDR3s).

 

[roche28]

Thank you both for the answer. The problem with memtest is i ran it before i knew that ram was failing and it showed no errors after 2 passes, and it recognized both modules, showing 4095 MB of ram. I'll probably buy that module and see what happens, if i run into problems i'll start a new topic.

 

[brispuss]

OK. And good luck!

 

[LowlySkeleton]

Hmm, Memtest should pick up most errors that point to either bad ram or improper speed/timing settings/voltage.

Thinking about it again, high disk usage is a fairly common issue with windows and is usually software-side issue, rather than hardware (like ram). High disk usage could also be due to windows trying to make a dump file about some sort of issue that caused a crash. It could have been pure coincidence that removing a module of ram "fixed" the problem.

 

[roche28]

Trust me, I tried just about everything about the high disk usage. In the end, i tried to reinstall Windows but it would fail for some reason, so i plugged it into a different pc to try and reinstall it while booting from a different drive and the original drive worked fine. I the tried booting from it, and there were no problems. So I plugged the other pc's drive into the original pc and it wouldn't boot, pointing to a problem with other components and not the drive or software. In the end, I removed one module of ram and it worked fine, but it wouldn't boot at all with just the faulty module.

Also i started getting BSOD's in the end, so ram was the next thing to check.