Thinkpads Forum

Hi all-

Recently got my shiny new X61t. I ordered it with the stock 1GB of memory. I added this 2G to supplement: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820220281. After a few minutes, Vista will lock up hard. I suddenly get the pretty blinking screen distortions, requiring a hard power off. I've tested for a couple hours with memtest86+ and it passed fine. Swap modules or put in the 2G alone in either slot, same result. Remove the new stick, everything's fine.

Any ideas? Did I get the right memory?

jargoone wrote:Hi all-

Recently got my shiny new X61t. I ordered it with the stock 1GB of memory. I added this 2G to supplement: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820220281. After a few minutes, Vista will lock up hard. I suddenly get the pretty blinking screen distortions, requiring a hard power off. I've tested for a couple hours with memtest86+ and it passed fine. Swap modules or put in the 2G alone in either slot, same result. Remove the new stick, everything's fine.

Any ideas? Did I get the right memory?

Do you have any other memory lying around, like a 1gb stick removed from another system that you aren't using at the moment, or a stick you could borrow from another system temporarily to test your new tablet? If you do, put in some other memory and see how the machine functions. If you can't replicate the problem you have had with the 2gb stick, then the problem is with the stick, regardless of what memtest 86+ tells you (it could simply be an incompatibility, but you are not going to fix that, either). If you don't have access to another stick, you could return the one you got and replace it with a 2gb stick from another manufacturer. Newegg will do a cross-shipment for you if you are willing to have a duplicate charge on your credit card account for a short while before you get the refund from the initial product, and this will speed up your testing/ resolution of the problem.

Have you tried running the system with only the 2gb stick and not the one that came in the laptop? If the 2gb stick works by itself, and the 1gb stick also works by itself, but not together, then that sounds like incompatible memory for some reason we'll never figure out. The "solution" would be the same thing as I suggested above, getting another stick of some other manufacturer's 2gb RAM, and trying that. Also, the 1gb stick that came in the laptop from Lenovo could itself be defective.

The other possibility is that there is something wrong with your system board. In that case, the machine needs to get serviced or replaced (it is a new one, right?). I'd try doing the testing with the RAM first, and calling Lenovo 2nd after you have already exhausted the possibility that you have defective RAM.

Thanks for the reply. I don't have another DDR2 stick to test with, unfortunately. I've tried all possibilities, and the system crashes when this stick is in, and doesn't when it's not. You're right that it's probably an incompatibility, I was mostly curious as to what might be incompatible. It's faster than it needs to be, but I thought that DDR2 was fully-backwards-compatible.

I'll probably just buy another stick locally and give it a shot.

What are the specs of the new module, what brand is it? It´s always advisable to buy memory in kits (means same manufacturer, same line).