• I think I might need help
    7 replies, posted
I'm not sure if I'm even posting this in the right place, so please excuse my ignorance if that's the case. Anyway. I have a Compaq Presario 1901WM that I bought new a long time ago in a Wal-Mart far, far away. Over time I've installed various components in it, and it's taken them all like a champ. It's survived falling down three flights of stairs, (in an apartment building) a PSU fire because a tiny mouse made a nest in the tower overnight, a CPU fire, power surges, and some weird centipede monster living in the ethernet port for a month. Unfortunately, the great Compaqumidium has finally fallen and it won't get back up. If I recall correctly it has: Windows 7 A dual-core processor, I don't remember what it is Four sticks of DDR2 RAM, at 400Mhz two are a pair, (2GB) one is a single gig and the fourth is some 512MB one nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX Two older HDD that use those old ribbon cable things, and one HDD that uses the fancy new hookup which has 7 and it's the newest A CD burner from an eMachines computer circa 2006 A DVD drive from a HP computer circa 2007 A Rosewell PSU at 400w Recently I had to stay over at my grandma's place to watch over her because she had a heart attack, so I brought my PC. (by the way she's doing okay) On my last day over there, I started it up and it gave me this blue screen immediately after the Windows 7 logo that said: STOP: 0x0000005 (0x0000000, 0x0000000, 0x0000003, 0x0000000) Sometimes the blocks in parenthesis change, but every time it starts with 0x0000005. When I got home I tried googling the problem on this here backup computer, but just about any site I go to won't load except Yahoo Answers which hasn't been helpful at all. Well, I tried the tried and tested, "turn the computer on and unplug it a bunch of times" trick, which didn't work. I don't know what that block of memory represents, but I figured it was a driver problem and therefore an issue with Windows 7, which can be fixed. So I started in safe-mode, same crash. Unfortunately, while I do have a legit copy of 7, I don't have an install disk but a handy-dandy USB drive that has previously been an excellent substitute. Obviously, I would have to repair 7 using that or, worse, reinstall it but at least it would be fixed. So I boot from the USB and... blue screen with nothing on it, and then my computer made a long, and terrifying, beep. Or maybe it was a hard drive trying desperately to free itself from the belly of the beast by self-destructing, I don't know. Since I was closer to the breaker box and I was scared, I flipped the master breaker and shut power off to everything. I am scared to plug my computer back in. D: If you need any additional information, please let me know. I don't know how to get anything from the BIOS because that's the only thing that's working at the moment.
Alright, I'll try each stick individually first. If that works, I'll start seeing which combinations will work. Do I need to run that pair of 1GB sticks together or can they run by themselves?
I would run memtest on each memory stick individually to see if they're bad.
Thanks for all the help, and I have good news: it worked! :D I ran memtest, it didn't turn up any errors even after a bunch of tries (fifteen to be exact) but it did seem to stutter toward the end of the tests, so I suspected the chip in slot 4 was being silly. I figured if I were to start a process of elimination, it would be best to remove them one at a time and try. So instead of taking them all out I just took the last one, the 512 stick and he has a tiny, tiny chink in one of the chips. It's old because it has some dust on it, but the crack that formed from it is brand new. Maybe the heat caused it to turn into a crack? I managed to get it up and running last night to collect some more system specs and to see if it would boot up without any USB stuffs. Turns out I was using two gigs of my total 3.5, but now I'm using all three after removing the troublemaker. So far I've booted up twice without issue with everything plugged in and once with just my keyboard.
This thread needs to get sticky'd in the tech support forum, because this is how you do it right.
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