I have been pretty well offline for the past few days as I attempted some computer upgrades.

That doesn’t sound like I’m much of a geek, but let me explain. First, I’m not counting my time at work; I am online on at least two computers at once while working, but I’m working. Right now I’m writing the first half of this post on my work notebook during lunch. Even if our network goes down at work and I am not online, I support computers for a living and that is geeky in itself. But I have to consider the work time different than the home online time; otherwise I probably would not go near a computer when I got home.

The upgrade was supposedly a simple memory upgrade. Karin and I built identical computers 6 months ago when it became impossible to continue on our old dinosaurs. I ensured our motherboards were capable of running 8GB of memory each, but for budget reasons we put 2 gigs each in at the time to see if it was enough. The computers run well, and we’ve had none of the problems everyone complains about with regards to Vista or a 64 bit operating system, but when I had multiple photos open in editing software while also keeping track of my favourite blogs, I could notice the slow down. This is to be expected when photo editing; it is a memory hogging task.

So last Monday we headed into Langley both to make a stop at the dentist to pick up pills for Karin, and to also stopped an NCIX to purchase extra RAM. If you have a dual-channel capable board, information in the memory can be accessed quicker if you have two sticks in the same coloured slots on your motherboard. Basically, this allows the system to access both at once, which lets your memory keep up with the speed of today’s CPUs.  We had put 2 sticks of 1GB each into each computer, and so my plan was to put all 4 sticks into one computer to give it 4GB, and then buy a package of 2 sticks of 2GB each for the other computer. The best available for budget minded people such as ourselves was some OCZ Platinum XTC for $75. This meant we each got to double our RAM for $38 a computer, a deal in my eyes.

But then the struggles began. I put the 4 x 1GB sticks into Karin’s computer, and then I Monday night I could not get my computer to boot with both sticks of the new RAM. I had to finally leave it so that I could get enough sleep for work the next day. Karin’s appeared to work fine, but then she messaged me Tuesday morning from my home computer to say hers was frozen. I had to have her pull the two extra sticks out so she could get it to reboot.

Karin’s solution was simple, I just had to bump up the RAM voltage in the BIOS because the RAM runs at a higher voltage the the board provides by default.  But for mine there was no such luck.  I flashed my BIOS to the latest version, and then began changing the voltage and many other settings.  Each setting has a range within which it could safely be set without voiding any warranties, but to try every combination took quite some time as I would have to insert just one stick, boot to the BIOS, change settings, shut down, insert the second stick, reboot and test.

After a couple of nights of this and some advice and research on the OCZ support forums, the possiblities were all tried and it seemed I might actually have defective RAM.  I ran Memtest86+ and confirmed that one stick is bad; and then kicked myself for not testing it sooner.

So this entire week has been one of working on my computer hardware, which is geeky; but wasting time when I should have tested for defects sooner, which is not so geeky.

We’re now off to Langley to exchange the RAM, and hopefully I will be up and running tonight.

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