ok, I'm back. I had to go to bed at 2:30 because my Internet connection died last night. No idea why. It was just one more thing to piss me off.
This is what I was trying to post when that happened:;
Ok, so back to square one here. I gave up on the scan when it got to 6656 errors.
Is it possible that the socket that the ram chip goes into is bad? And if so, could that cause my problems or is this a compound issue.
When I put just 1 of the new chips in the first (top) slot in the lap top and left the second (bottom) slot empty and try to boot up, I get the "Select Normal or Safe Mode" loop. Hitting F10 on restart shows that the memory is 896MB.
So I assumed that was the bad chip of the two I bought.
Then I put the second chip in the top slot, again leaving the bottom slot empty and rebooted - this time getting into Windows (with the error message about "one of the files containing the systems registry data had to be recovered...") Going to "My computer" and checking systems stats, it STILL says I only have 896MB of memory.
So, does that mean:
A) Both of the new chips are busted, having only 896MB of memory and coinsidently, that old 256 chip in the same spot also was missing 128 of Ram?
Or
B) The first (top) chip socket on the mother board is broken and always knocks 128MB off of whatever value RAM is in the slot - which would explain why before the supposed 512 was only showing up as 384MB
'B' seems logical as the odds of 3 chips all being short 128 seems odd - but if its the motherboard and not my new memory then why does Windows SOMETIMES load depending on which of the 1GB chips I put in? and WHY did memtest86+ find nearly 7,000 errors with the chipset.
Right now I put the two old chips back until I figure out what I should do next.
Also, I can't seem to do a system restore. Every date I pick, it goes through the restore process and reboots but gives me a message that "Windows can not restore to [given date]" and that "no changes were made to your computer"
With the old memory in it boots up into windows and all her programs show up and I don't get the warning about a file in the syst registry being recovered BUT it still is having other problems - like it wants to install photoGallery (but can't) and wants to install MS Word when you're using outlook (even though word is installed).
I think some files were either corrupted when I had the new RAM in OR were deleted one of the several times that CHKDSK ran itself. So it would be nice if I could do the system restore... but I can't
