Broken RAM? Trying to upgrade

[Leotardo]

Hello and thanks for a very informative forum. I'm sorry if my question have been answered before, but I couldn't find anything on it.

My old T410 broke the other week. The main board fried itself for some random reason, and the local workshop could not save it.
In it I had 8gb (2x 4gb) ram.

I just bought a fairly new T520 to replace it, with 1x 4gb ram. As I work with music production, I'm gonna need at least 8gb to run a fair amount of plugins and what not.
So I thought "hey, I could just use the ram from my old T410". After reading about it on here and elsewhere, it seems like the ram should fit both computers. But the T520 won't even start up with the old ram installed. I tried both running only with the old ram, and pairing one old block with the new one.

Can it be that the old ram has been fried with the main board? The T520 works fine with the original ram.

Hope it made sense Thanks

[Leotardo]

Here are the ram. Old to the left, new to the right. I can't tell from the labels if they are the same Hz

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b285/ ... .13.20.jpg

[imahustla]

Did you try to boot with only one old ram stick installed, does it boot then? Flip the left one around to see if it has same markings as middle stick (2rx8 pc3-10600s)

[MrMaguire]

You could also try:

- Cleaning the contacts on the old RAM with isopropyl alcohol
- Putting the new RAM in the T410, to confirm/eliminate the possibility that the old RAM is faulty

Motherboards can kill good RAM. I had a Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L where the northbridge wasn't soldered on properly at the factory. It produced tonnes of RAM related errors, and killed about 6GB of DDR2 1/2GB sticks.

[Leotardo]

They all say 2Rx8. I can't test anything in the T410 since it's completely dead.
I cleansed the RAMs as suggested and did some more A-B testing. Turned out that only one of the old RAM blocks was faulty (the middle one)
I now got the system up and running with 8 gigs

Thanks for all the help! I'm a happy camper.