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Bad RAM

Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 11:00 am
by jgsx
So today my X60s froze up. I tried to reboot and all that I got was a beep code, 1 beep, 4 beeps, 1 beep, 1 beep. Turns out that the ram stick that came with the notebook was bad. Luckly I had a Crucial upgrade in there, so I am running on a single 1GB stick now.

IBM says that they will ship me a new 512 stick, but they are on backorder and he couldn't give me an ETA

Anyone else have OEM memory fail on you?

Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 7:01 pm
by atlacatl
No bad RAM, but I concur with the back order from IBM's side. Two weeks they told me, so I ordered a gig from crucial last Wed--I received my memory the next day.

No problems with both sticks...

BTW, crucial's prices go up and down. I bought 1 GB for $189.99. Today I checked and it is $201.39. That pesky supply/demand law.

Re: Bad RAM

Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 8:20 pm
by archer6
jgsx wrote:
Anyone else have OEM memory fail on you?
I have had that same experience.

Reminds me of how reliable all things electronic have become. Today with the relatively small number of failures to deal with, when something like this occurs it seems like such an unusual event... :)

Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 8:25 pm
by christopher_wolf
My friend just bought a T42 (and a T40 for his Mom) from IBM and installed Crucial memory himself, later on...The machine did the 100 pixel scramble and would barely POST upon any boot attempts; it turns out that one Crucial stick he got, above specs too, was bad. The OEM IBM memory checked out just fine via memtest whilst one Crucial stick did not.

Only one time did I have OEM memory not be up to par; my old HP ze5170 would have random shut downs amongst other things. Running memtest later on caught two problems per each DIMM module in the HP.

Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 10:08 pm
by atlacatl
Good news for your friend if he got the RAM from crucial.com directly.

They have a lifetime warranty. If they said it would work, they will make sure it will work, no questions asked.

He should should call them and they will send him a new stick. I have done that in the past with some RAM that didn't work on a Dell machine a couple of years ago.

Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 11:13 pm
by archer6
atlacatl wrote:Good news for your friend if he got the RAM from crucial.com directly.

They have a lifetime warranty. If they said it would work, they will make sure it will work, no questions asked.

He should should call them and they will send him a new stick. I have done that in the past with some RAM that didn't work on a Dell machine a couple of years ago.
Very good point, that I forgot about. One of my employees got a faulty stick of Crucial memory from another reseller instead of Crucial. Just happened that once he identified it as bad, the vendor had ran out. So he called Crucial direct and they replaced it for free including shipping, just as though he had purchased it from them!

This was a 3 of years ago and I was so impressed that we began using Crucial exclusively since. We have purchased in excess of 100 modules per year from them and have not had a single failure!