Hi all
In December last year, I decided to pick up an extra 1Gb stick of RAM for my ageing Dell Vostro 1510 laptop, since it was only £10 and I was determined to increase its performance somehow. It worked, in a sense, and the laptop ran a lot faster, but the hibernate and standby features no longer worked. I put up with that for a while, but then it started to crash and restart intermittently...
Fast forward a month or so and the restarts were frequent enough that they outweighed the speed benefits, so I pulled the new stick of RAM out thinking that would fix everything...but it didn't, I still had the same problems. I ended up putting the stick back in, since I figured if I'd have the problems regardless, I might as well get the speed benefits.
Fast forward to now, and it's getting ridiculous, 2 or 3 restarts per day. I'm a final year student, and my laptop is my only computer at uni, so it's pretty important that it works. I've also been doing a lot of mathematical modelling and calculations lately for my final year project, and there's nothing more frustrating than having the computer chew over a calculation for over an hour and then be the victim of a random restart before it finishes.
I figure that the best/only solution is to scrap the RAM that's in the laptop and buy an entirely new stick or two. I've tried running the built-in Vista memory test, but I've no idea where Vista buried the results, and I've no writeable CDRs to burn Memtest to, but logic suggests it must be the RAM that's at fault. That said, I'd be grateful for any comments on what might have gone wrong, and what I should do to fix it. Is buying new RAM a sensible idea?
PS: I know this is a laptop issue, and I've put it in General Hardware, but I'm assuming that this type of RAM issue isn't a laptop-specific problem, so I hope the thread's okay here.
In December last year, I decided to pick up an extra 1Gb stick of RAM for my ageing Dell Vostro 1510 laptop, since it was only £10 and I was determined to increase its performance somehow. It worked, in a sense, and the laptop ran a lot faster, but the hibernate and standby features no longer worked. I put up with that for a while, but then it started to crash and restart intermittently...
Fast forward a month or so and the restarts were frequent enough that they outweighed the speed benefits, so I pulled the new stick of RAM out thinking that would fix everything...but it didn't, I still had the same problems. I ended up putting the stick back in, since I figured if I'd have the problems regardless, I might as well get the speed benefits.
Fast forward to now, and it's getting ridiculous, 2 or 3 restarts per day. I'm a final year student, and my laptop is my only computer at uni, so it's pretty important that it works. I've also been doing a lot of mathematical modelling and calculations lately for my final year project, and there's nothing more frustrating than having the computer chew over a calculation for over an hour and then be the victim of a random restart before it finishes.
I figure that the best/only solution is to scrap the RAM that's in the laptop and buy an entirely new stick or two. I've tried running the built-in Vista memory test, but I've no idea where Vista buried the results, and I've no writeable CDRs to burn Memtest to, but logic suggests it must be the RAM that's at fault. That said, I'd be grateful for any comments on what might have gone wrong, and what I should do to fix it. Is buying new RAM a sensible idea?
PS: I know this is a laptop issue, and I've put it in General Hardware, but I'm assuming that this type of RAM issue isn't a laptop-specific problem, so I hope the thread's okay here.