Well, today I got it into my head that it would be fun to upgrade my RAM. Indeed it was fun, for a given definition of the word “fun”, ie: one that actually isn’t very fun at all.
I had three gigs of RAM in three, 1 gig sticks. I have four slots on my motherboard, so I figured I’d add a stick. Best Buy had a sale on a four gig stick for $30. I made sure my RAM was compatible, bought it, and biked on home, cheerful at the thought that I would soon have seven gigs of RAM!
Foolish, foolish Badger…
Getting the RAM put into the PC was easy enough. I then turned it on and…nothing. My screen was completely blank. Fortunately, I had a friend visiting who works as a computer tech for IBM. He fiddled and twiddled and decided that either my graphics card was dead or my monitor cable was dead. He figured I’d hit the card with some static electricity or something. This bummed me a bit.
After he left, I tried something. I removed one of the RAM sticks and booted up again. That fixed it. The computer came up like (almost) normal. I was getting a message that said, “Master boot error,” but I figured I could deal with that in time. I poked around in my system and determined that my computer was indeed detecting the extra RAM, though, so now, even though I didn’t have seven gigs of RAM, I did indeed have six, and that’s twice what I started with, and more than I’m likely to need for a couple more years.
I still haven’t fixed the other problem. I looked into it, tried a few suggestions and now it sounds like I might have to reinstall Windows 7 tomorrow, but that’s ok. I have the disc and there are worse things. In the meantime, I have extra RAM now, and that pleases me to no end!
